Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.

I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

Did you end up writing a word processor? :)

	▲	thaumaturgy 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Haha! I did, but not for a few years, until I took up Pascal and MacOS and then wanted to find a way around the 32k text limit that was a stubbornly difficult problem to solve for a while (and was the original reason that BBEdit became so popular). Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.