In the mid-Seventies, the era the OP was talking about, the only way a kid could access computers was at school, and pretty much only high schools had them available to students. The computer would typically be one single minicomputer or a timeshare terminal. His school had both (he was lucky). The teacher was the gatekeeper and decided who had access. Back then, there was no way to start programming at 9 or 10.

It took a lot of dedication to learn programming. You'd have to wait in line with a bunch of other students to submit your program on cards or paper tape, run it once, debug and fill out new cards, and repeat the next day. The output would be printed on paper (no video). I wrote a blackjack program, but the teacher wouldn't let me run it because it was too interactive. He wanted us to write batch processing programs that calculated water bills. It was a big reason why I stopped programming and didn't come back for 15 years.