I wrote my first program in FORTRAN IV in 1972 in an "enrichment" class at my school in Worthing - in the south of England (it calculated the average of 10 numbers). We wrote the programs out by hand on 80 column "coding forms" which were then snail-mailed to the regional computing...
There was the father I met in the water out at Worthing Beach who right off the top asked me how the economy was in Canada. He gave a good overview of the challenges for Barbados where such a significant proportion of foreign exchange comes from tourism. Economy wasn’t his only concern...