I was given an Apple IIc for my 9th birthday. What was interesting was the Apple came with a 5.25 disk that taught the basics of how the IIc worked, the concepts of variables and a simple introduction to AppleSoft Basic. You're probably not surprised that like many of you on stackoverflow my first program was something like:

10 PRINT "JEFF IS COOL"
20 GOTO 10

The first time I coded with others was in an ansi art group called ATOMiC.