My dad ran a pretty popular BBS in the 80s, so I was using C64 and Amiga in my early teens. I wouldn’t say I started programming ‘for real’ until the 90s, though, when I went to college. I was a music major (theory/composition) and doing a lot of scoring/engraving and MIDI hackery, but my school also had a “multimedia” program that caught my attention so I learned stuff like HTML, PHP, Flash, Director, and Authorware.
Later in the 90s, I left college (and retail work) and got my first proper developer job working with FileMaker 4.
I started with Assembler for IBM/360/370. I did Cobol early on. I could ‘tweak’ existing code on RPGII for the IBM S/34. My early database programming experience was with dBaseIII+ and our company’s mainframe database Express.
I was also the company guru for writing Lotus Macros. I would go to mainframe, pull data down, massage it and upload back for e-journal entries. Then print user-readable journal entries.
I started with FMPv3 as my start with FileMaker. For me, Assembler helped me to understand what the machine was doing, with my help. Cobol gave me training for structuring the code.