Me too – I remember how hard it was to get a C64 in my country. I had to wait more than a year, since the first couple machines my parents bought for me were confiscated by customs.
I learned basic and assembly, but what I was most interested in was the CPU. I studied EE just to learn how to make a CPU, and all my industry experience is in hardware design (which turns out to be a lot of programming 
).
So, I learned to program as a way to express difficult problems and solve them, and as an extension to mathematics and logic. I enjoy thinking computationally.