Yes! When I was about 6 or 7 I remember spending hours typing in a BASIC program from a book on a BBC Micro at school. It drew a circle on the screen and flashed different colours which I thought was the best thing ever. I couldn't figure out how to save it to disk after running it so I had to type it all out again the next day.

Hurray for the beeb, because at the time it was probably a better platform to learn on than any other machine available, but it was quite expensive.

My real start was 74 series chips though, and from there the TRS-80, which I was allowed to use at a radio shack, it was cheaper than buying logic parts.