I think for me it must have been 1981 or so, with a VideoGenie, which was essentially a TRS-80 clone with a built in cassette deck. I graduated from there to the RML 380Z, which was a great bit of kit - complete with a software front panel that you could type hex codes into. Mostly BASIC, but also some Z80 assembler on the 380Z - I still have my Rodnay Zaks "Programming the Z80" on the shelf in the office, and I think it was my fondness for that that made me not quite so interested in the BBC Micros when the school starting getting lots of those - they were ok, and repeat-until was a cool thing to have, but otherwise, nothing so thrilling.
At Uni we were taught Modula-2, with diversions into Prolog, PDP-11 assembler and a brief glimpse of Fortran, Pascal, but no C (86-89; it was still a bit of a fringe interest). A little bit of BBC BASIC on my much loved Cambridge Z88 (which was sadly pinched during an office move in the mid 90s).
Then I got into Perl, PHP and assorted bits of UNIX/Linux tinkering, with diversions into the scripting for stuff like FileMaker and DataEase, before coming back to BASIC a few years ago when I wanted to start doing cross-platform work for Mac and Windows, when it seemed like one of the simplest ways was to use Real Studio, and that then lead me to Basic4Android when I wanted mobile stuff.
Having not done BASIC for a long, long time, the thing that had changed most - though I suppose coding for the web should have prepared me for it to a degree - was the fundamental way programs are constructed now. Back when I started, a program ran, did things, then stopped, or used GOTO to pop up its menu again.
Procedures and new data structures like Maps were easy to grasp, from things like functions and associative arrays in Perl, or the modules of Modula 2. But I think for me, the hardest part in coming back to BASIC after so many years away from regular programming was the whole event driven nature of modern coding.