The very first bits of code I wrote were in BASIC, on a teletype-style terminal when I had just turned 17 at high school. This thing had a roll of paper instead of a screen and a keyboard to type stuff on. Offline storage consisted of a device which would punch your lines of code onto a roughly 1 inch (2.5cms) wide paper tape which could then be rolled up and kept safe.

To use the terminal, you had to take the special telephone that sat next to it in the cupboard, place the handset into the acoustic coupler at the side of the keyboard and press the button on the phone which caused it to connect to the mainframe at the city university some 5 miles away.

After learning more basic, plenty of COBOL and a tiny bit of 6502 assembler at college, I bought myself a 16k Sinclair Spectrum and taught myself Z80 assembler. Over the next few years, I owned a Sinclair QL, some old thing with an 8-inch floppy drive that ran CP/M, an Amstrad PPC512 luggable and various other bits and pieces of kit.

My day job between 1992 and late 2000 involved writing reservations software for the tour operator/travel market, which gave me an opportunity to learn a bit of C for interfacing to Galileo, Viewdata and Unicorn systems. I went to work for an ISP in early 2001 and these days I do most of my coding in Python, but the stuff that I learned in the early days has stood me in good stead none the less.

I think mikec hit the nail on the head - back in my younger days, computers didn't do very much 'out of the box' and there wasn't much commercial software available. If you wanted to find out what your new toy was capable of, you had no choice but to roll your sleeves up and write the code yourself.