When I was 8 or 9 my mom sent me to Computer Camp - up until that point I don't recall ever having an interest in computers or even knowing what one was. The computer camp was at a Radio Shack store and lasted a week, all I really remember from the camp was playing some Oil Well diggin game and really liking it on the Radio Shack CoCo.
That christmas I got a TI 99-4/a. I remember knowing some really dumb BASIC stuff like infinite for loops to print my name. My friend across the street got a Commadore and the he had cool games but the TI didn't have cool games so I started programming in BASIC so I could have cool games like him. The first thing I wrote was Track and Field based on the old Arcade games. I had the Long Jump and the Hurdle events working. I made a one on one Basketball game. Commadore's was call Bird vs. Jordan so I called mine Gerving vs Ewing...it was fun making those.
Then I started learning Assembly because the BASIC graphics where limited to single color sprite animation and I was at least 2 color sprites
I've only ever tanked 3 semesters of programming courses in college which included C, Pascal, Fortran, COBAL and VAX Assembly.