Dono, I SURE wish I met you before you left town. I was putting on and taking off training wheels at 6 circa 1970.
My Stepdad was a Systems designer for CSX railroad, but I sadly did not go any further than 1 Fortran class in Western Md College back around 1984 when I was 20. Do Loops and If thens is all I remember, other than arrays and getting stuck on one task where the program went through one time to pick something from the array, then when I had notation to go again, it would pick the same word from the array. I had trouble making it make random choices.
Electronics Hardware and Car Parts, and anything that makes a thing go whirr always fascinated me as long as it wasn't cheap or over engineered junk with planned obsolescence. Transistor radios and all the bits inside always blew my mind that anyone knew what all that stuff did.