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Back in 1976 I took a FORTRAN course at Georgia Tech. The first time I saw that I could make a machine do THAT the lid was off. I was hooked on it and still am.
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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1979 on Commodore PET 8k computers. Why? Because it was interesting. I went to college for computer science because I had no idea what else to do.
Looks like it worked out for me. 
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When: In 1980, our high school was picked as one of the 'test' high schools in the province to have computers: 3 Commodore PETS - 16K models.
Pretty much self-taught on Commodore BASIC and then 6502 Assembler.
Why: I had taken a data processing course before where we studied the history of computers, then, in the last term, we wrote programs using mark-sense cards. That peaked my interest.
From there... it was college and over 30 years of professional work.
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I started in high school back in 1979 when I was a junior. We had three teletypes connected via modem (rotary dial phones and acoustic couplers) to the minicomputers across town at UND. The actual computers were a PDP-8 and a PDP-12 and we were learning BASIC. They wouldn't let us save anything on the computers but the teletypes were able to punch holes in paper tapes and read them. In my senior year they actually got an Apple II. I spent a lot of time in the computer lab and found that I really liked working with the computers. After I graduated from high school we moved down to Florida and I went to college. I just really enjoyed working with computers and I was able to get paid doing it as well. It's always nice when you can get paid for doing something that you like doing.
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I saw a computer at a trade fair when I was a child and even it was green letters in black background I had it clear I loved that...
I started at an academy when I was 9... since then I've never stopped.
I started professionally at 1998 (some years before I did small jobs in different companies but the first serious thing was 1998). I specialized in the industrial/mechanical environment where robots and special machines live...
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I started learning to code in 1977, when my stepfather bought a COSMAC ELF[^] single-board computer. It ran a 6502 processor with 2K of RAM. Our ELF was a deluxe model, and included a hex keypad for program entry. We found a Tiny BASIC interpreter that only took 1.5K of RAM. Adding a KSR-33 teletype gave us text I/O, and we were in business. I learned BASIC and wrote a lot of programs on that thing.
For the "WHY", we have to go back a lot further to the early 60's. We always watched the Gemini and Apollo launches. While the launch itself was great, I was mainly fascinated by the control room video and the idea that such machines were controlled by people pushing buttons on a panel. I eventually learned about computers being at the heart of things, and it's been all downhill ever since .
Software Zen: delete this;
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About 1975 and I thought it would be a useful skill as computers were going to be everywhere. Started on a dial up to the local university, with BASIC. My school had a teletype that we used to communicate with the HP mini at the OU.
Later we built a Nascom.
modified 23-Feb-18 9:05am.
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1980, Commodore 64s and a TRaSh-80 in math class, 11th grade. It was fun. Wrote an Asteroids style game on the 64. It was crude and sooooo slooooow but cheaper than 25 cents for the real thing!
Now I do programming for the money and it's still fairly fun. Outside of work, I don't much like computers.
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1981 - Montana State University, CS 151, Pascal, Honeywell mainframe. Always like solving problems. Almost 40 years later, I still enjoy the challenge and the creativity.
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When I give a computer something it doesn't like, it tells me clearly and plainly what I did wrong, and when I fix it, it doesn't hold a grudge.
I'm (a bit) autistic, so this is the only time I really feel like I have some sort of connection with something.
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1973 - HP 2000C timeshare on an ASR-33 terminal.
I loved the Star Trek game and wanted to learn how to create my own.
Went over to the University Bookstore in LaCrosse, WI and bought the programming reference manual.
We had 8k of ram and 100k of program storage and kept our own programs on punched paper tape. Still have the Star Trek game on a roll of punched paper tape.
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When: 1979, High School
What: Ohio Scientific Challenger II microcomputer, BASIC
Why: Video games were COOL even if the best that could be achieved was a CARET firing a PERIOD at an X!
Result: College degrees, but never published a game. I'm more DBA than coder these days, but it has been a fascinating journey that I have loved and continue to love everyday!
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I wrote a FORTRAN program in high school to calculate chess moves. It was an eight-level nested loop. My Dad had to punch it in cards to run on an IBM 360. Somehow, he came up with the program needing more seconds to run than there are atoms in the universe. From there I went on to learn IBM 360 machine and assembly language and got access to a large mainframe to make the bell ring.
My WHY is that computers were cool, and might somehow help me with physics to build my flying saucer. Later, the WHY was changed to helping our country be more of a democracy than a republic, then changed to simply manage work flow in offices. Now, my WHY is to keep my health care after retirement.
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I started with a commodore 64 and basic, moved to a Tandy with basic. Maybe 1980? I was fascinated and took all the basic programming classes in Junior High and High School. Majored in Math in college and took all the programming classes they offered, all the guys in the class were spending 20-30 completely the Pascal coding assignments at one point and it was just so easy for me. I loved it! In those days I was the only girl in the class, but I grew up on a construction site working for my dad. I was in my zone! Programming was a big puzzle and still is, and yelling at the code when it doesn't do what I want is a bonus... because that just means I need to figure out what I am actually telling it to do. I stay a programmer because I love the challenge!
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In 1978 at college I made my first contact with a computer and programming language, BASIC. I didn't get it, failed. Then in 1980 at a different college I took a FORTRAN class, got the technical aspect of it, aced all the tests, but had to use punch cards to produce programs, which was a pain, so I 'borrowed' punch card stacks. Again, didn't really get into the whole computer and programming thing. Jump forward to 1986, after changing schools again and changing majors from Aeronautical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Architecture to Art to Forestry then to Jewery/Silversmithing, thru a few part time jobs, in and out of college then back in, I came to the realization that my brother graduated in CompSci and was making good coin. So my whole reasoning for jumping back into CompSci/programming was "If my brother can do it and make money then I can to." No other reason. So I reluctantly jumped back in, had courses in BASIC, Pascal, Assembler on DEC-PDP11 w/ giant floppy disks, C, but what really REALLY hooked me was a graphics class using Turbo Pascal on a PC. I could visibly see results from my coding efforts. So after 10 years of wandering the planet I finally graduated in 1988 in CompSci, and now 30 years later, I still code C/C++, creating data entry tools that generate code for others so they don't have to. Which is really sad they miss out on programming but that's a whole new topic...
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I learned to program on a HP 2115 minicomputer whose primary IO methods were paper tape and a teletype. One evening while trying to get something to work, I typed "why" at the command prompt. The computer replied "Why not". Since HP published the source code for the basic OS (HP Assembly Language), I dove in to see if I could find where "why" was being parsed as a legal command. As I remember, it was very well obfuscated using octal constants for both data and executable code.
I guess I'll have to go with the HP2115's answer to the question Why? Why not!
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Started on HP 2116B, 8K memory, ASR33 TTY, 75 IPS tape drive, 200 channels slow speed DAC, 12 channels of 100K high speed DAC.
One manual covered hardware and software.
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I designed and built a ADC card. We were recording nerve signals on a high quality multi-channel analog tape recorder, playing it back into the computer at 1/16 speed and doing FFTs and correlations to see how the nerves encoded information.
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They were manipulating a cat's knee joint with a swept sine wave and measuring the activity on a nerve in the upper leg. They found that there were sensors in the knee that were sensitive to both position and velocity, with a hint that there was some sensitivity to acceleration.
The data processing was all done in HP's Fortran and took a long time. After they upgraded the computer to a HP 2100, which gave you access to the micro-code, I created a couple of new machine instructions that sped the FFT up by 15%. The 2100 systems also came with a disk drive that has both a fixed and removable cartridge. I am guessing that the platter was 14" in diameter and held maybe 2MB.
How was the HP being used in your situation?
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Apple ][ with Apple BASIC -- Why? Because there were almost no useful programs then; it was the pre-VisiCalc era. Then I added a CPM card and a roaring-loud hard disk drive the size of a shoe box. Followed that with Compaq PC, Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo Prolog.
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I was stationed in Italy from 86 to 90 (Vicenza, airborne infantry) when I found Tandy computers at the PX. I bought one with two floppy drives and the disk had gwbasic on it. I started messing around with it and reading everything I could about working with computers and programming. I haven't stopped yet. Being able to get the computer to do something makes it worthwhile.
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I was in college to become an EE (back in the 70s) and came across Byte magazine. Started reading about these new things call microprocessors and decided I could build a board with one of these, so I did (with a z80 processor). It was finished the day after my last final senior year. All I did for the next 3 weeks (until the start of my new job) was learn to program it. I had a whole 4K of RAM and a 2K EPROM containing the Zapple monitor program. There was no programming language so I was programming machine code by the numbers, poking values into memory, executing code at specified address, dump memory, etc. It was fascinating! At the new job, they were just starting to design a microprocessor base (Motorola 6800) smoke detector tester/calibrator. When they found out I had a computer at home, they asked me if I wanted to work on that project (of freaking course!!). I've been designing/programming ever since, mostly embedded systems.
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I taught myself BASIC from a book my dad had on Dartmouth Basic back in 1978. Why? Why do you do anything when you're 14 -- because I wanted to.
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My first coding was was in 1981 when some office donated a boatload of Commodore Pet 2001 Series computers to the school district I was in. My middle school math teacher ended up with them in his room, and offered to stay an extra hour after school every day to give anyone access to them that wanted it, in exchange for $20 a head, while letting us all know he knew nothing about them. One of my friends manages to get his hands on a manual from his dad's office, and we all started teaching ourselves Commodore Basic.
The next year, we all signed up for the "all new" computer class at the High School. They didn't really teach us anything. The teacher just came in and told us to do whatever we wanted, as long as we each turned in one "educational game/program" each quarter that could be handed over to the grade schools in the district so they could do something with the donated computers.
My Sophomore year, I consulted for the district to put their 5x7 index card attendance system into a database program. They bought the database program, and I designed the system (with its amazing 5.24" floppy based data transfer system) and trained all of the attendance secretaries in the district on how to use it.
That was also when I learned the value of getting signed contracts before doing any work.  They originally promised me $2000 for the job, but when everything was done, they told me that as a government entity they could not legally pay money to a minor as an independent contractor, but would make sure that I received an A grade in the computer class as compensation for my efforts (as if I wasn't already getting one). Lesson learned.
Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
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