If you want to feel happier about that time in my life a bit in the pre-Tony-has-Internet era, I basically learned to program using a Vic-20 and books available from the public library that was just down the block from my house. Once we had a slightly better computer (a Compaq XT-clone) and I was getting bored of BASIC, a guy at a local computer shop sold me a copy of Power C with the absolutely fabulous book that came with it for $20: http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm. From there, we had an amazing upgrade from the XT to a Pentium 133 and dial-up Internet, which got me into Slackware Linux, downloaded one 1.44MB chunk at a time until I had enough of the A- and N-series packages to bootstrap PPP and download the X-series of packages to get a GUI and a browser.

Hardware-wise I feel like there's a lot more very affordable kit that kids like me could use to get their feet wet, but software- and learning-material-wise, I'm not sure if there's anything quite as good as some of that old stuff. These books, for instance, were abundant at the public library and really got me going: https://usborne.com/ca_en/books/computer-and-coding-books

Thanks for posting Usborne link, the explanations and drawings in the books are very unique. Just bought "Simple Basic" for my children, lets see if it's going to be more captivating than Scratch books.