RE: BASIC (Or, The First Programming Book I Ever Read) (stevejohnson.posterous.com)

If you want an introduction to making Scheme games in a graphical environment that lets you iteratively code and run, you might try DrScheme combined with this book draft:

http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/

Note to Steve: your comment section does not seem to work.

Could have been Commodore 64 - Introduction to Basic Part One, or many of the many Usborne books available at the local libraries.

Or perhaps one of the "The Bytes Brothers" books I had: "Compute a Clue" and "Input an Investigation"

Edit: Geez there were a lot of books around encouraging kids to code back then. Do such things still exist?