love this question! it's both fascinating and depressing (depressing because it makes me feel old :)
I was a wee young lass in the early to mid 80s, when I was first introduced to computers. My mom brought home a Commodore64, not really knowing what to do with it, and I remember messing with that for hours, not only playing the games, but writing little programs as well. My dad brought home an Apple IIe from work not long after, and I was introduced to AppleBasic and Logo (remember that turtle?) where I really started to understand what programming was and what it could do. In middle school, we got a Packard Bell 386sx with 1MB of RAM and a 50MB hard drive :) I taught myself DOS 3.3 and was making batch files left and right, emulating my friends 486sx Win 3.1 functionality. High school I taught myself basic, pascal, c, and c++ on an old VAX system and college got me into web programming :)