BASIC? Back in the day you programmed by flipping switches and that ought to be good enough for anybody. 
(Yes, I’ve read about the history of Micro-Soft.)
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LOGO was a great learning tool! It opened the door for “turtle graphics” which in turn inspired all sorts of high level programming notions like recursion and graph theory. I could think of no better starting language, really much more ‘modern’ than (punch) card inspired languages like BASIC.
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Toggling in the paper tape loader program got very old, very fast.
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Oh christ, has that given me the mother of all flashbacks.
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Don’t just look at an animated GIF of an Altair 8800, play with one in your browser:
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IBM Mainframe Assembler. 
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Indeed, i recall having a ton of fun in that class messing around with the program. Too bad i didn’t pick up on wanting to learn scripting but all in all it was 100% a positive experience 
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I think plenty of people have heard of FORTH. If you owned a late-model HP calculator (28, 48, 49, 50) the RPL programming language they used was basically a Forth with lots more data types. You can also get Gforth for a lot of platforms.
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Was this by any chance the astronomer who created MOPS?
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Circa 1970 we had two ASR-33s tied to a TSS/8 timesharing system shared by a number of high schools in suburban Boston. Up to 16 simultaneous users each running a virtual 4K PDP-8, hosted on a 32K PDP-8 with a 64K hard disk. Everyone started out with BASIC, but the more curious (like myself) could also play with FORTRAN IV, FOCAL, LISP, and MACRO-8 (assembly language).
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I remember reading a helpful tip in “Boys Life.”
“To save time when typing in computer code listings, you don’t have to include the REM statements!”
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Oooh, BAL. Nothing more fun than trying to teach second-year students assembly language and explain why BALR and USING statements made it possible to actually access data in memory. Good times!
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In 1978 or so, I had a job for a few months writing financial software in FORTH using a proprietary multi-user implementation running on the Data General Eclipse. I had been developing minicomputer-based systems exclusively in assembly language at my previous job, that was actually my first experience writing commercial software in a “higher level” language.
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FORTH 
IF HONK THEN;
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Tis funny, the fact that early FORTH implementations limited word definitions to a maximum of 16 lines of 40 characters altered my coding style until this very day. I still break things up into lots of short functions/methods, rather than the hundreds of line monstrosities that more modern coders seem to prefer.
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I remember when turtle graphics showed up on Mr. Wizard!
Loved programming in BASIC. My mom was just telling my granddaughter about how I would program computers at stores we walked into with BASIC programs and walk away.
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My dad bought the family an Apple ][+ when I was … well I don’t remember how old I was. 12, maybe? Whenever that computer was new. My dad and I learned BASIC together. Good memories.
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Commodore PET, me. Just had the cassette loader. Had I the skills then, programming virtual memory would have been fun. Loading… … … …
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Oh man - in the back of 321 Contact Magazine, they would have a BASIC program you could type out. Which I as a 7 year old would do, and inevitably make a few typos and the dang things wouldn’t run. And I wasn’t detailed oriented enough to find the typos and would give up and do something else haha.
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Same here: FORTH (and Lisp) taught me to code small focused functions which effectively (if done right) form layers of DSL-like interfaces.
And so-called ‘modern coders’ should know better - long functions are a code smell!
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