Unless you ended up using a Commodore 64 or one of its ancestors which was completely sprite-oriented and thus not much good for canvas-type programming. I've often thought my life might have been different if I had asked my parents to get me a Sinclair spectrum instead of relying on the fact that our school had Commodore computers to push them towards a Vic-20.
Sprites? Luxury! We went to bed hungry dreaming of a linear framebuffer while seven angry pixels fought viciously over a single colour bit, keeping us awake. On an Apple ][, that is.
>> I wonder what today's generation growing up on?
My kids are growing up on the same old 8-bit machines that I grew up on. After all: those old 8-bit machines still work just fine for the task of learning to write code.
Any reason not to still use old 8-bit machines to learn programming? I can't think of a single one.
Take here to ask the same question.
What hooked me on BASIC was the graphic capabilities. It was relatively easy to create dumb little graphic programs: circles that changed colors and grew, etc.