1965, sixteen years old, learned FORTRAN at a summer Math Camp. Walked off the street and got a programming job with an insurance company in 1970 (Assembler).
You must have been retired already by the time Linus put his first line of code into the kernel ? ;-) Well, my first system was ЭВМ ЕС-1033 (soviet clone of IBM S/360) back in 1988 and I was twelve. Me and a friend of mine we used to attend a local HAM radio club where we studied electronics, soldered radio receivers and other simple electonic devices (hoping to build an HF transmitter one day of course). For that we…
I'm still programming. I run a company selling graphics software, for Windows and now macOS.
There is no job more interesting than programming.