I learned Basic in high school in the mid-70's... on a TTY machine. Someone smart thought it might be a good idea to take it as an "elective". Was good for a lot od ASCII art printouts.
Bought a C64 when they came out so I knew what to do. The real fun came when I got my hands on a Hesmon cartridge and learned 6502/6510 assembler code (long story, but I built my own card and programmed an EPROM). My first 'project' was to build an interface to an FM audio subcarrier (SCA) demodulator/decoder that I built as a home project and the code to display/manipulate the data stream.
The 80's were fun. Been coding on various devices in various languages ever since.