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I started on the VIC at age 4 (my mom taught me to copy the programs from the book and subsequent magazines). At first, to be completely honest, I entered things in with a ton of typos and she corrected them for me. But she was a touch typist and insisted that I use the correct fingers, so I was pretty proficient by the age of 6. I wasn't programs that I wrote, though, that's the time when I got interested in changing things to see what they did.
I got the C64 for Christmas when I was 7, wrote my first game and later a mouse driver (yes, there was a mouse for the C64). By 13 I was gaining notoriety in school for writing choose-your-own adventure games in graphics mode that made fun of the most popular kids. 
Later on I ended up working at a government project with one of the contributing authors of BYTE magazine. He was 2 years from retirement and I was less than 1/2 his age. He wasn't too impressed with the 'I read your stuff when I was 7!' comments. Go figure.
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Damn, I wish I was older.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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Cut my teeth on a Data General Nova, mini computers were the fashion of the day when I started out.
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Nova 3 or 4?
Did you have to start it up by toggling in the binary bootstrap to load the OS from the HDD?
I think that I could probably still toggle that in if I closed my eyes and didn't have a morning coffee...
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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When I started, we were in 10th grade and the nearest computer was at the university 20 miles away, we would write on Fortran sheets, someone would punch them for us, and we'd get the result (if we were lucky) or the punch cards to re-punch (normally).
The write / compile / test cycle in 1975 was 1 week !
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I did use punch cards in college, they wanted to give us experience with them as they were still being used by busineses. However, I never had to use them in real life. 
Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.
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1968 IBM 360 Mainframe in college - 026 card punch, late night turn around 24 hr. 1975 got better turn around at work by taking a 6 pack of beer to the data center at night -- operator shared my beer and ran my jobs with high priority. My co-workers never figured out how I got that kind of turn around.
When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.
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Yup, IBM 370 era. Used to program in COBOL using punch cards!! LOTS of cards to type. We used to have to carry the cards around in carts because they were so heavy. The last thing you wanted was to drop the pile and get them all mixed up. If you did you had to take them to a special sorting machine that could put them back in order for you. Punch card readers were always getting jammed. Those punch card machines made the best confetti though. TONS of tiny little rectangular pieces that got everywhere and were impossible to pick up without a vaccuum cleaner. Oh yeah! those were the days.
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At least you has a sorting machine. We had to resort to drawing a diagonal slash on the top of the deck with a highlighter so that we could manually position things close and then have the operators do a deck printout to help us get things right. With classes like compiler design, we were able to reuse parts of older assignments which meant that the slashes were no longer in the right place. The solution was to choose another color of highlighter. I still think I have my old highlighter ten pack around the house somewhere.
By far the worst thing was missing a semicolon. The compiler would bail on the first syntax error of this type, meaning you would have to wait for a card punch, add your missing character and resubmit things. fortunately, the turnaround at the beginning of the term was only about 20 minutes. Later it went up to 2-3 hours, however.
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don't worry man I am sure there are still some machines you could program with punch cards you just might have to search a bit harder.
Also, you may just be disappointed though I wouldn't really know from personal experience that would be my guess.
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I used cassette tapes on the first machine I programmed with. That was in the early 80s and I was 8 to 10.
John
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Guilty as charged!
Then moved to paper tape in an industrial placement. (So much easier to carry, and if you dropped it it didn't shuffle itself.)
At least you could edit paper tape, but rewinding it could take a looong time.
After this, ed (unix) and edlin (DOS) were a vast relief, even if mots of my code was stored on twin 1Meg 8inch floppies. Not exactly large, even then: I ended up writing a progam to remove all the comments from my assembler code, just to get the source code small enough to fit on two disks and assemble...<shudder>
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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I started in the first 70s with a GE. I remember that the 12k core memory was as big as a cupboard.
I started with FORTRAN language, and just to speed up the development of scientific programs I learned a little bit of assembler. That FORTRAN compiler let add punched cards with assembler code to change the program so to avoid the recompilation which lasted in the range of 45-50 minutes. (And for little corrections the time shrinked to 3 or 4 minutes)
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Early 80's, FORTRAN & COMPASS, Control Data Cyber 170-750 at Brussels University...
-- Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
http://streambolics.flimbase.com
S. L.
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Missed out the 16 bit platform somehow, until I started on Windows 3.1. The Acorn Archimedes has been the most impressive thing I've ever used, based on what was available at the time - it rewrote the rules.
Interesting fact of the day the VIC in VIC-20 stands for 'Video Interface Chip' not entitely applicable but they liked the ring of it apparently. Something to tell your wives/girlfriends.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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In 1996, I first saw a working computer with a very nice application, Wordstar in particular. Also played DOS games such as para troopers(my favorite).
A drop of water breaks a rock not by brute force but by patience.
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First time when I was 11 years I did not know anything about computers But could write my name on the TV screen using the commodor 64.But now I can write my name on the codeproject. 
Of one Essence is the human race
thus has Creation put the base
One Limb impacted is sufficient
For all Others to feel the Mace
(Saadi )
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Great at the time! Waiting by the cassette player and listening to that mystical scratching and bleeping sound!
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Copying a BASIC game program from an article onto a TRS-80. Using tape cassettes for storage. Ah the good ole days... Only had a few months access to it though.
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Ah... The good ol' tape drive... Music to my ears...
They really did want it to be painful in every way waiting for something to load, didn't they?
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
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Yeah but at least I missed out on the lunacy of punch cards. I don't think I would have stuck with that.
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Still own one. Don't use it. cut my first assembly language program to do a bubble sort on it. I loved it.
When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.
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I would play the Buck Rogers game and then load up SmartBASIC from tape and try to code anything. At the age of 9 just getting something on the screen and knowing that I caused it to be placed there was epic!
Then of course after a year or eighteen months I left the tape in when turning on the computer and it erased everything on the tape. So I had to revert back to playing Gargamels Castle, Ladybug, Zipper and Zaxxon - wow, life was awesome then.
[ADAM Computer Review]
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On my parent's Epson Equity 1+ with gwbasic.
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ZX81, Commodore etc - nope. My first Computer was a Microprofessor[^]. Had no such fancy things like a screen or a proper keyboard. Hacking hex-codes was the way how to program this thing. My 'Assembler' was a piece of paper and a pencil. But this is how I learned the basics of programming. H210018 for those who remember...
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