I knew enough about the Commodore 64 Basic that I could leave the mall Radio Shack with it flashing wild colors or streaming a sentence. (Which was a highlight of going to the mall.) I started actually coding when we got a PC clone around 1984. First the Basic that came with it, and occasional forays into Assembly, which always felt like black magic. But soon enough Turbo Pascal was the real deal. And then I got hooked up with Turbo C, and boy was I hooked. I probably learned the most about the internals with C, because of pointers within a context I could actually easily reason about.