Maybe you ought to look up your examples.

> Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab".

That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper started programming when Howard H. Aiken[1] designed and IBM built a computer[2] for her to program. Seymour Cray was also born before the first usable computers were created. I don't have concrete date, but I strongly suspect the other early pioneers also started programming when they first got access to a computer.

I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O)

The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html

Before I got my first computer I read in some book about the first ever chess program that was written to be executed by a room full of people. Hey I thought, no money, but I do have paper, pencils and time. So one sheet became my 'variables', the other my program and I would run my BASIC programs without so much as a keyboard to touch.

That's not the fastest way to run your programs but things like 'guess a number' are definitely doable.

Shortly after that I got a Saturday job at a local radio shack which gave me access to the real thing.

So it's not necessary to have access to computer hardware at all to learn about programming, even though it certainly helps.

It's not actual age that's the issue, it's relative age. If your peers have an eight-year headstart down the learning curve, it's tough. At a low level you internalize: they are god tier, you are not.