40 years ago when I was 15, I was an Explorer Scout (yeah, I was a bit of a nerd). Bell Labs (now Lucent) opened up their doors every week and taught teenagers how to program computers. I learned Basic, Fortran, some other obscure but similar languages, and even a bit of machine language. As I recall, the computers we used were PDP 11s with Teletype machines for consoles. We saved our work on paper tape. For those of you who have worked with punch cards and keypunch machines, punch cards are a step up from paper tape.
I had no idea at the time that it would later become my career.