I had my own Windows 95 PC (120 MHz Packard Bell) that I saved up lawn money for (my dad agreed to pay 50% for my first computer). I wanted to learn programming, but found the C and C++ books my parents bought me to be really dense. So I taught myself QBasic (and TI Basic on my TI-83). If I had had anything like the youtube videos, online tutorials, blogs, Stack Overflow, etc. that modern folks have, high school would have been completely different.
I have a friend who taught himself the DOS prompt on his parents' computer when he was in early high school. He had no access to any materials (this was before the internet was available); he literally typed every possible combination of letters and discovered the commands (dir, cls, move, del, ren, etc.) and tried to infer what they did.