24. Even though we always had a computer at home, I never got into programming and spent most of my time playing games. (The learning curve was too steep, and besides, what could I possibly make that was better than the games I was playing?) Then when I got to college I majored in CS. Now I'm definitely interested in making games. :)
In my opinion, the abundance of dynamic and interpreted languages, powerful tools, programmable hardware, and the internet make getting into programming WAY easier than it was before.
But even you - a smart capable person who likes computers - didn't do so because you already had all the games you needed.
Those home computers? You load a game, or you start programming. Since loading a game often meant fiddling around with a tape cassette and cable, and a few minutes hoping it would load, it's easy to see why people decided to try to code themselves.
I know abstraction is a good thing. I know it's powerful and etc etc.
But there's something nice about being able to squirt data to an address, and know it's coming out the parallel port, and having a hokey resister-ladder DtoA converter hooked up to turn that data into music. Or to have a single instruction to draw a pixel.
As a counterpoint, I'm 20 and I started programming exactly because I was playing around with extending a game (Neverwinter Nights was the game), which involved using the built-in tools to make new levels/worlds but getting elaborate behaviour required scripting in a C-like language.
I remember being utterly confused by what a statement beginning with "while" did, but eventually I was reasonable enough to mostly implement a (very weak) checkers-playing AI.
This then lead to programming Lego robots in C, which was pretty neat. (Actually, thinking about that, the first programming I did was using the graphical LabView thing that Lego provides for Mindstorms robots.)
23. I started when I got bored of the games on the computer my parents had at the time, and I started opening random programs and eventually ended up in the QB3.0 editor. After early attempts at using it as a word processor failed (it kept complaining about syntax errors when I moved the cursor off the line) I asked my dad, and he showed me how to do
PRINT "Hello from the Computer"
And I worked my way up from there with the help system, and a lot of trial and error.
It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.
I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)
In my opinion, the abundance of dynamic and interpreted languages, powerful tools, programmable hardware, and the internet make getting into programming WAY easier than it was before.