The internet makes a huge difference. I first got the internet at home when I was 12. Was then able to learn to program. Before that, I really wanted to learn everything I could about computers, but the local library didn't have the books I needed, I didn't have any adults or friends who could teach me, and I also didn't have the software I needed (I didn't even know what a compiler was). The internet gives anyone who wants to learn about programming and electronics access to references, tutorials, YouTube videos and even knowledgeable people they can ask questions to.

This is why IDEs with built-in documentation were so valuable and such a big help. I largely learned to program using such resources, with QBasic, QuickBasic (much more help), Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. Mostly before or without internet. I learned data structures and algorithms from classes in parallel with this (along with some other languages), but actual practical programming knowledge came mainly from built-in IDE documentation. Before QBasic, I had GW-Basic, with no built-in help, and learning was very slow.

I learnt to program at age 12 with no Internet. We had magazines, we had manuals, we had libraries. It used to be that a "home computer" came with a programming language (usually BASIC) and some introductory material out of the box so a whole generation of programmers learnt that way. But I guess there was some gap where this wasn't a given any more... In some ways today is worse than the "old days" because you don't need to program these things to do stuff with them.

> But I guess there was some gap where this wasn't a given any more...

Very much so. First computer has MS-DOS 5. Which boots and gives a blinking cursor to 'do something' with. This often entailed editing mem.sys and various .bat files to get a game working. Or the abstraction that was Word Perfect that was not WYSIWYG that content and layout are separate concepts, and yes, magazines usually had 10-50 pages of BASIC stuff to do 'cool stuff' with.

From my observation, the change happened with Windows. Not was was a GUI, things apart from batsock mainly 'just worked' (except when they didn't) and it was no longer necessary to be required to peer into the (albeit high level) bones of a computer.

And this was true before DOS, C64, Spectrum also offered somewhat hands-on experiences.

But... perhaps not so obviously in Windows-land, if I were giving a kid a computer I'd make sure it was Linux as the command line's not far away, and encourage use of it to get an implicit understanding of what's happening - again a somewhat higher level understanding than creating a RISC-V chip, but more-so than 'right click on the desktop to change wallpaper' - use mkdir to create a directory, understand repositories and how everything's a human-readable text file. Basic stuff with GNU tools, then a little scripting, perhaps some Python.

I was also 12 and found a magazine (ala SciAm) which had a small program snippet to compute a number in it. My buddy knew enough to tell me that it was Basic and my computer came with QBasic.

I didn't have anyone else to ask, didn't know about any computer clubs (and didn't think to ask). So I got very familiar with the built-in help. Spent hours looking through the help until I found the one I needed.

Didn't help that I started learning English only a year before, so had no idea what most of the help said anyway. I vividly recall spending a week figuring out how to loop indefinitely. Finally I got to "while". Was so pleased when it worked.

A bit later my buddy got a modem, and with that BBS access, so he downloaded snippets for me and programming articles, and things accelerated.

On the bright side, finding and reading documentation is now one of my strong points. Hanging on IRC I could usually help others within minutes with libraries I'd never even heard of, simply by diving into the documentation for a bit.

I went to my local home computer club when I was around 12 to soak up information beginning of the 80s; there were all these guys (only guys) there much older than me who knew everything and liked helping a kid who, by then, knew how to program basic, asm + pascal. They taught me eprom programming so I could swap out the basic rom, programming BBS software (I wrote a few BBS systems for myself after that; I had hosted a BBS since age 10 and it was always cool to have different features etc than the rest) and making cartridges for all kinds of purpose.

Before that I got most from magazines & books; my grandparents took me to fire sales (lot of magazines there) and 'rubbish sellers' (not sure of the english word), for instance, Phillips had a quarterly 'dump' sale under the football stadium; all kinds of electronics, books etc could be had there for next to nothing (money earned with strawberry picking in the summer went to those places). I bought scopes, ham radios etc and documentation there. And my father got me books that were damaged from work (mostly C, Pascal, later Clipper and other things).

I got my first certification at the age of 15. It is truly amazing what young people can achieve nowadays, as long as they are surrounded with the right people and technologies. I read something some time ago, where a 13-year-old built a fusion reactor in his home.

I recall discussing that Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor build with a particle physicist friend and from looking at the (very unshielded) apparatus we felt that it was extremely dangerous to operate for a lot of reasons (chiefly, but not nearly only, the neutron flux). Impressive work but really unwise.