I dunno about this; IME even when it was highly approachable most people didn't do it. I was around back then, got my first Commodore in '84, and even the Geek / Nerd circles were mostly just for people swapping copies of commercial software. It wasn't any better when I graduated High School in '91 and even in College almost no one outside of STEM was doing any programming.

It wasn't and still isn't a popular activity.