My first experience with a computer was with a TRS-80 circa 1979 at school. I don't actually remember when I started writing programs in the BASIC of the day, but it wasn't long. By 1981 I had a Commodore VIC-20 at home to continue what I was doing at school.
The computer classes were not a regular class, but an "enrichment" activity that basically stole time out of our other classes periodically to cram in extra subjects at the Gifted and Talented elementary school program I was in at the time. I don't think we actually got graded on this, at least not anything that appeared on our report cards, but the teacher knew who was doing well. By 1982, I was part of my school's computer programming team, and we went to one annual local programming contest (later on there were two of these) where we did well (winning in some years). They had so low a budget for these contests that they gave us one lousy trophy to be shared by the team, so we passed them around; I ended up with two or three of the trophies we earned over the various years on through high school with largely the same teammates.
The VIC-20 didn't last too long, so around 1983 I got a TI 99/4A, which by that time was also a computer I had available at school. The school's, though, was the familiar silver and black one, while the one I had at home was the beige model TI made in preparation for launching a line of more powerful versions before instead scrapping their whole home computer division and cutting prices deeply to quickly get rid of the inventory. For what it's worth, the TI never broke, though by the time I went off to college it had become a useless toy and I used other real computers. I played Blasto on it the summer after my freshman year of college; that was the last it was used for anything.
In high school, there were actual for-credit computer classes, even a required credit to take one. To satisfy that computer credit, there were two classes available:
- Computer Math, which was actually BASIC programming (they used the Apple IIe which was woefully out of date by then)
- a business computing class that taught how to use word processors and very rudimentary use of spreadsheets (no real programming)
By that time I knew everything that was covered in the Computer Math class and the teacher (who was also my coach for the programming team) knew it. I held off until my senior year completing that credit, in hopes that a proposed advanced computer class (which would have taught us about compiled languages as opposed to BASIC) would come to be, but it didn't happen. I ended up enrolled in the regular Computer Math class and, instead of the regular curriculum, she had me learn Pascal from a book using a compiler for the Apple IIGS which was located in the library, which was reserved for me during her class hours the whole term. As a result, I didn't even attend her class most days, only occasionally to turn in work to show my progress. I don't know if the IIe wasn't capable of supporting such a compiler, or if this was a ploy to allow me to learn away from the distraction of whatever else they were doing in class.
In any case, I finished the lessons in the book before the school year was over, and spent the last bit of the year back in her classroom, writing a text-adventure game in Apple BASIC with a map loosely based on the school at the time. Winning the game required obtaining three keys, one of which was inside a computer located in the computer room - in the right spot on the map - and the key had to be obtained Zoolander-style, more than a decade before that movie hit the screen. It wasn't much of a game, but I did turn in a playable version of the game as my last work in the class, though whether my teacher ever played it, I don't know.
With a single exception when I once encountered some Pascal code later in life, that was the last time I did anything with the language, though the principles provided a good framework for learning Fortran and subsequently other languages in college.