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 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.