yep - started with a commodore pet 3032 at school, aged i think it was 8. very unusual that a school actually had a computer. i watched someone type in a program:
10 FOR I = 1 to 40
20 PRINT TAB(I), I
30 NEXT I
40 GOTO 10
and the number scrolled 123455bababababa in a diagonal line, and i went, "ah that's obvious".
from there, i went on to work out how to read the keyboard (GET), we typed in a "would you like a cup of tea?" program (if N goto 10) which explained all about how you needed to make tea. from there i began to write games after someone else brought in an Apple IIe (as a personal computer!) and it had "castle vulfenstein" where you shot german soldiers all very politically correct.
the games i wrote were much simpler (40x25 screen, go figure) and usually involved drawing and moving of dots as "bullets", which could be stopped by on-screen ASCII characters if you were lucky. we set up 3 sets of keys so that 3 of us could play (wasx and z for fire, tghb and okl,) and soon discovered something called "keyboard matrix scanning limitations" whereby one player could hold down keys that cause the other players' controls to be non-functional.
by age 11 we'd moved to skelmersdale, where several neighbours had weird machines like superbrains, jupiter aces, tangerines and one guy even had a Z80 that he clocked by hand with LEDs on the outputs just to see what it did. he actually took notes when i explained what i'd been doing with keyboard input (interactive no less!) and things like screens.
after wrecking my eyes borrowing a neighbour's ZX80 with a ZX81 ROM upgrade, and playing chess in 1k of RAM (unbelievable) and typing in 1-line BASIC programs that would scroll binary across the screen, my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum (and a thermal printer, wow!). and a 16k RAM pack eventually. after several months of typing in games and programs, and playing jet-pac and lemmings, i actually bought my first computer software: a BASIC compiler. it could do 26 variables (A to Z) as integers, no floats, and no strings. cost me 30 quid.
by school aged 13 to 18 i'd moved to BBC Micros - the school had 6 of them, all connected via Econet. memorable times there included writing a program which sent notes to each computer on the network so that tunes with more than 3 notes could be played across all 6 computers; writing networked games and creating something similar to "Risk" which was stolen by one of the kids, hidden under carpet where feet destroyed the 5.25in floppies irretrievably. the lab also had one of those digital programming interfaces, with GPIO, ADCs and DACs, which i used on a BEEB to do strange experiments out-of-hours.
so, naturally, when it came to a choice of university and a choice of degree, perhaps unsurprisingly i picked Theory of Computing at Imperial College. there we had a Gould Terminal system that could connect and route over 2,000 VT100 terminals to a configureable array of servers (micro-vaxes, SunOS 4.1.3 and so on). that started to get interesting, especially when someone did "cat /bin/csh | lpr" by mistake. if you're familiar with line printers, you'll now how bloody fast they are and how much of a racket they make. "cat /bin/csh | lpr" churns out 600 pages *real* fast.
all good fun...