I can't imagine programming on an old Mac. I tried it once with Turbo C, but I couldn't bring myself to it. I admire you gameboy900.
I had no programming courses whatsoever in my highschool *sigh* so I had to teach myself. I started with Applesoft Basic on an Apple IIe. It was pretty fun, and easy to learn. The only "full" runnable thing I ever made was a pong clone (seems like those are popular).
The next thing I worked on was World Builder, a pseudo-programming language, more of an IDE with a proprietary verion of Basic. I made a few games with this, as it was addicting at the time. I think I was doing this in, geeze 6th grade (wow, time goes by fast). I messed around with this on a MacSE for about a year. This Scotsman, Ray Dunakin, is the guru of World Builder, and all of his games have received some award from a Mac game magazine.
Then when I started high school, I decided to stray away from Macs and move on to Windows based computers, as there were lots of resources in that area. I dabbled in VB (I think it was ver.5) for just a short time, left it, picked it up again, repeated that process over and over again, just doing examples from the book.
That basically covers all the programming experience I've had up until now so I would say I'm sort of a newbie too. I'm really enjoying finally being able to learn programming in a classroom environment with a good teacher.