My brother bought a ZX Spectrum when I was about 8. A couple of years later he let me keep it. I entered code listings from magazines, but never did any real programming myself. Later on (at 16-17) I got an Atari STE. I used GFA Basic to create some simple wireframe 3D cubes and similar simple programs. At about the same time my father got a Compaq 386 laptop, on which I used TurboPascal to create a music database with the worst bubblesort implementation ever devised. I have been programming professionally for 12 years now.