We never had a PC when I was growing up, but my buddy Chris has a TRS-80 ("trash eighty") which was fun to mess with. It came with a handful of BASIC programs which, if you typed them in, could run some simple games. But we had the source code, which meant we could mess around with it, experiment, and see what happened. We taught ourselves some BASIC, really, and this was in 7th grade back in the 70's. There might have been some colleges offering BASIC programming classes, but sure as hell no high schools at the time, at least in Lansing, Michigan, let alone junior highs. Ha ha! We both make six figures these days doing IT shit, neither of us with a degree in it. Well, I have an Associates, which is almost better than nothing I guess.