At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use
Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation.
EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy of Half-Life, right after it was launched. Our computer, with standalone graphics card, was barely able to run the game. Back in those days, being a gamer and chasing cutting edge graphics was really expensive.
Prior to this we had a electric typewriter, and the main purpose of the machine was to be used for writing documents and other business activities. My first experience with programming, was editing HTML files. I then went to the library to look for books on programming, and the only book I could find there (rural nowhere with population 3000) was a book on Pascal, or possibly Delphi.
I was told that there was this one wiz kid in our small rural town that as supposed to be "really good with computers", he was a couple of years old. I hit him up, and the first thing I noticed in his room was this big "Borland C++" box on his shelf - he showed me a basic 3D flight simulator clone he was working on, as well as some sort of Doom clone. I was in awe.
Suffice to say, he did very well during the dot com boom. Skipped college, and went straight into employment.
A couple of years later, when I started in high-school, some older semi-retired developer had recently moved to town. He worked with our school, and offered a Java programming class. Really excellent teacher, and that was the moment I decided I wanted to work with computers.
I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.
The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with.
The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.
Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.
What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.
If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.
> ...an unusually open minded computer teacher.
I've heard this story several times before and I, myself, had an unusually open minded computer teacher as a youth. I'm beginning to suspect this attribute is is not so unusual amongst computer teachers as has been assumed.
A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.
Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe.
A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away.
With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.
But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal value from them!
>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.
>The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s
>The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab
So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined.
It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident.
Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many people don't get to have.
I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated.
Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4.
I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today.
I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far.
The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice.
And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools.
Credit where credit is due, dude.
I once discovered where the texts for our touch typing exams were saved on the network.
Made for some funny exams afterwards...
Edit: well, funny for my adolescent self...
We did the opposite.
Once the source texts were found, we changed them all to short sequences of home row keys.
Everyone began typing at 300+ wpm.