I started with a minimalistic Basic dialect on an Intertechnique (all commands were just one letter long - but it had an oscilloscope!) at my father's office. When I was about 12, my parents bought me a Commodore 116/16. I started with its Basic, but later learned some assembly, too (from a German book - I didn't know any German at that time, and my English was rather rudimentary). My father later obtained an XT at the black market (Eastern block was under IT embargo) with a Hercules card, and we were able to get a copy of Borland's Turbo Pascal floppies (after the fall of the Communists, he bought a legal box with all the books and stuff). Pascal was all I needed to get as far as the University and first few sidejobs.

At the University, Pascal was the main programming language (I finished the final exam on the first lecture), but they also taught us Prolog; I also learned SQL at sidejobs. In the third year, I was introduced to *nix with tcsh, Emacs, sed, ... and Perl! A colleague used it to replace my hacky Pascal program we used to search our research data. The original script later grew into a large Tk application, and when the colleague was hired by Google, I became its primary maintainer. I later left the University for private sector, but I stuck with Perl as my main language on all the jobs - it fits my brain best of all the languages I've tried.