If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged

That is simply not true.

We weren't poor growing up but we were not far from it (at least according to the Western standards). I remember having to eat only once a day and wearing clothes with holes in them because we couldn't afford to go clothes shopping. My father, a good engineer with a university degree lost his job after the Soviet collapse and my mom had to work 2 janitor jobs.

However, if my father knew someone who had a broken radio or TV he would get it for me so I can take it appart and play with the innards. I had a soldering iron and a neighbor had given me his old voltmeter. So I was learning quite a bit without having expensive equipment.

I started to like computers, because I saw them at schools. The Americans had donated us some nice shiny IBM computers and we were fighting to get access to them after school. My mom notice my new infatuation with computers, and she saved enough money for half a year and then bought a Russian ZX Spectrum knock-off and a tape player.

I had asked my neighbor (who was a TV repairman) to hook the console up to our old black and white TV. Then I learned English so I could read all the programming manuals. My friends used to copy and pirate games. But I enjoyed writing basic, assembly, pascal and C. If you segfaulted, you had to reaload the compiler from tape so you waiting for 10 minutes. It was a fun but very arduous process.

Anyway, the fact that we were poor didn't prevent me from hacking since I remember. All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education.

(By the way mom was not allowed to go to school after her 7th grade because she had to support her family. I think she vowed that her children will get all the education they want no matter what).

I wouldn't say privileged, but certainly lucky. My father worked very hard on the railroad for his money. He wasn't 'privileged' himself, either; he came from a poor family and rose to the middle class by working like a dog.

Also, I knew some 'very poor' kids who had these machines. Funny, I don't remember them being expensive (but what did I know; I was 8 ;) Maybe they were; I'm too lazy to research it.

When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a normal kid. This means I was made to play outside a lot.

A couple of my friends' parents were programmers, so they had computers at home. They could write programs in BASIC and Pascal and make them do cool things. I wanted to do that too.

I had a notebook where I would secretly write BASIC (it was terrible code, by the way). My school had computers, a whole 10 of them. They were 286s running DOS. When I would get a chance, I would plead with a teacher at my school to let me stay in the computer lab after hours and try out my code.

I got my first computer at 14. Now, it wasn't my computer. I could have at most an hour a week on it. This was a rule that was strictly enforced. So I was still writing a lot of code on paper (usually hidden under my math notebook).

So I was never encouraged to become a programmer, I was actively discouraged from doing that. But somehow even without access to a computer I wanted to code.

At a certain point my parents just gave up trying to make me a lawyer or doctor. So there's a happy ending. Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of story.

I remember mine (1981-2) being $100, but that was a long time ago. We hooked it to a junky old black and white TV somebody had thrown out. I think TVs were pretty ubiquitous by then.

I'm not sure where I fit in this discussion. I was comfortably middle class growing up. But I didn't have a computer until I was a sophomore in high school. And while I thought it was cool and I spent time on it, I didn't do any actual programming until I took a course my senior year of high school.

In my freshmen year of college, as a CS major, there were plenty of students who had been programming much, much longer than me. In theory, I was at a disadvantage because just about everything was new to me. But, in practice, everything evened out by about junior year. Yes, the students who started programming well before college were at an advantage for the first few programming intensive courses. But very quickly, a CS curriculum goes into material most people don't teach themselves.