That would have been the early 80's. When BASIC was not owned by Microsoft, when it was spelled BASIC for whatever compiler you used, and it had line numbers, and GOTOs. I started programming in a gifted program with a dumb impact printing terminal with an acoustic coupler you stuck a phone handset into to network over the public switched telephone network after I got into a gifted student's class in 5th or 6th grade. I didn't get a CS major in college because you had to travel between central Kansas liberal arts colleges for classes and I didn't have a car, so I majored in math instead, and never have broken into the software or IT world, really. But now I'm getting close.
In those days you started with Logo or Turtle, or maybe BASIC, and then started seriously studying programming with Pascal, then you learned C and later complained that they didn't put you on a Unix machine working with C starting in CS105. We had no idea how awful things were compared to what would come.