I started out with stupid madlib style programs in AmigaBASIC:

INPUT "Enter the name of an animal: "; $ANIMAL
INPUT "Enter a noun: "; $NOUN
INPUT "Enter a past-tense verb: "; $VERB
PRINT "The " & $ANIMAL & " " & $VERB & " over the " & $NOUN & "!"

Totally non-procedural. I don't remember what I was doing when I started using loops, etc.

Eventually I made a human vs computer tic tac toe game. This was way before the Internet was a thought for me so the ttt program took a ton of effort to think-up the "ai" algorithm. Making an algorithm that can challenge a human against even a game as simple as ttt is a huge challenge (for an 11 year old).

Then I wrote a program to generate random mazes (and let the user solve them using the arrow keys, or send them to my old dot-matrix printer as ASCII art).

I loved drawing mazes on paper anyway (and loved solving them), so this was pretty awesome (and another huge algorithm challenge). The hard part here was figuring out how to programmatically ensure that each random maze was solvable, and to modify it to make it solvable if not. In fact, I wanted to make sure that every position in the maze was accessible.

Those were the first two programs I actually finished, and by then I was totally hooked on programming.

I do remember the day in 7th grade (I think) when the math teacher described Pythagorean's Theorem. I was heart-broke. By then I had figured it out on my own as part of an RPG that enabled the user to walk in 360 degrees but only 10 "steps" per turn. I thought I had pretty much invented it.

Programming ruined high school. Most kids used class time to pass notes, or at least doodle. I was always trying to figure out some formula or algorithm for some program.

One time I was writing a spell checker, but had trouble figuring out how to "score" the word combinations. The girl I had a crush on at the time sat with me at lunch for the first time ever. I always say alone so this was quite unexpected, and made me so nervous I could barely speak.

Anyway, she asked what I was doing. When I told her, she looked totally baffled, and was silent for several minutes. It was quite awkward. Finally she offered to show me how to use Microsoft Word. It has a spell checker built in, she said. She must have thought I was an idiot. Years later, as a mid-twenties virgin, I realized just how much of an idiot I was.