Add me to that list, though my Commodore machine was a PET 2000. In fact, I was young enough at first that all I could do was remove lines from other people's basic programs and see what happened. It all grew from there.

I probably started the same way. I remember spending forever typing in BASIC games from magazines and books from the local library. They never worked straight off, so a bit of "debugging" was usually required, i.e. spot the typos.

Interesting, did similar. But there was no information available to me about working on them for a living in the early 80s. Only the movie Wargames, which while cool didn’t seem like a realistic path, nor did it pay. Didn’t figure it out until a full decade later.

Maybe at 10 years old, I wasn't thinking much about working, but the VIC 20 started me on the programming path, with an IBM PC being our next home computer a few years later.

Definitely helped that I just missed the punch card era. I know young me would have dropped my stack of cards many times…