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I also took to computer programming at a young age (7) but couldn't get my hands on a computer until age 15 -- computers were too expensive back then. Even used computers cost several hundred dollars, and my family was poor at the time. I remember that in 1991, a cheap, slow, crappy computer system (with 14" monitor) used to cost $1,300. There were no "Raspberry Pi" $35 computers, no $300 laptops, no $400 small computers, no $200 little cube computers, none of that.

I remember that my father bought us the Atari 400 when I was 10.  I don't know how much that cost at the time.  I got this program cartridge "BASIC".  I bought a bunch of magazines and a few books and started hacking away at programming.  But all we had to save our work was this magnetic tape drive (same type of thing as an audio tape).  I spent most of a summer working on programming a game ... a sports game.  It was actually pretty good by the day's standards.  So one morning I get up and try to restore my program from tape so I could pick up where I left off.  About 30 minutes into the restore process, it failed.  I tried again desperately a few more times ... to no avail.  So I lost a couple months' worth of work.  I was determine never to let that happen again.  So I started saving up for this newfangled device called a floppy drive, a 5 1/4" drive that held an amazing 1.44K of data (if I recall).  I was finally able to purchase one at a deep discount for $250.  We bought floppies and then realized that if we used a hole puncher to make a slot on the disk that we could put data on both sides.

Atari 400 just hooked up to a TV, so no monitor required.

Atari 400 with BASIC cartridge inside:


You can see the Joystick slots on the bottom there, as this doubled as a great gaming system.

And the Cassette Drive that failed me on top of the $250 Floppy Drive I saved up for:

Not to derail the thread but there were other cheap computers available during the 80s like the Commodore 64, Timex/Sinclair 1000, and others.  But they were all toys compared to the IBM PC.  If you wanted to do serious work you needed to get a pc for $1500.  Also the dollar figures are misleading because of inflation.  A $400 laptop today would be the relative equivalent price point of a low end tv which in the 80s would probably be around $100.  But at that time a $100 computer was a toy.  The $400 laptop today is a serious machine.  Certainly not top-of-the-line but still a tool for doing serious work.  Also if you bought any computing equipment in between 1975 and 2005, you had to resign yourself to the fact that it would be obsolete within 3 years or less.  Now when you buy a computer it will be current for at least 5 or 6 years.