That's awesome. I usually raise eyebrows, even from colleagues, when I mention that I started programming at the age of 8.
Of course, times were different back then. You had a computer that booted straight into Basic. You didn't need to install anything, register anything or even open up an editor. The prompt was your editor.
All I knew back then was that there was this prompt and this manual. You typed commands, and the computer would reply with something (at first, just 'Syntax Error'). Then I discovered conditionals (and called my parents to show off). And got an assignment from my father - he wanted me to draw a grid that he could use to calibrate TV sets (TV was the standard display device for personal computers). I did it, after working for most of an afternoon. Some time later, I discovered the 'for' loop (or rather, finally understood what it was for) and rewrote all of it in 5 minutes and 4 lines. And the rest is history.
EDIT: Even more impressive is that the author managed to keep himself focused and finished the job. At 15, I had already started the trend that would lead to a huge string of corpses of unfinished projects.
If/when I have kids (hopefully a long ways off) I'm going to find a way to get some sort of BASIC machine in my house. That's where I started (at about the same age as you) and I still remember a long drive from Cheyenne to San Francisco, sitting in the back seat of our van with a toy VTech computer and a book on BASIC I found in our school library.
My kids have my old Oric-1/Atmos machines (I got a couple spare, heh heh..) and they love 'em. Nothing better than giving the kids a 'safe' computer to use (no Internet!) and coming back to some wild creation a few hours later ..
Today's equivalent would be a TI calculator. I had a similar experience coding in BASIC on a TI-89 during a road trips with the TI-BASIC manual. There is indeed a very awesome feeling about coding on a simple device with a physical manual.
