I'm 21 and I started programming in 2002 on Sharp PC-1500. It was a BASIC computer, already way way too old for any purpose at the time but I had a great time with it. It all started with a loop, I immediately fell in love. Then I did a program that could tell how old you were, it first asked you your name and then it asked for your date of birth (the current year was hard-coded) and then the output was something like : "Hi Simon ! You are 8 years old." Then I did something that could calculate which day of the year the birthday on this year would be. It asked for your birth month then for your birth day. From then on I never stopped programming.

My point is that BASIC is a nice way to introduce younger folks to programming. I didn't have a Nintendo 64 and I did not play hockey like most of my friends (you guessed it, I'm from Canada) so it became a hobby. It baffles my mind that it still the simplest way to learn how to program. At age 8 you'd have a hard time figuring how to use an IDE, toolchains or even the web console. I was the kind of guy who was bored by school and was done faster than everybody. If you still have one of these computers you should consider giving them to someone like me.

I'm a little surprised by GE's CEO at the time having such a low tolerance for experimental lines of business. The GE-225 computer only came into existence because the team building it hid it from him, and despite being a runaway success by early '60s computing standards, he not only fired its creator, he stayed adamant about getting out of the business and sold it all off to Honeywell -- including Multics, the mainframe OS that greatly influenced Unix's design.

Granted, it's not like GE faded into obscurity based on this decision, but it seems to reflect a different corporate culture from even what we'd consider "conservative" today.