I started in the early 80's learning basic on a
DAI_Personal_Computer and assembler on mainframes.
(big fun starting a mainframe by programming a boot loader by flipping 16 (binary) switches in the front, every time giving a single instruction. Once completed booting (20 minutes entering binary code), you could use the card or tickertape reader to load additional software. And if you where really lucky you where allowed to write some data to a huge diskpack of 4Mb total.