"tHe PrOgReSs hAs bEeN iNsAnE"
I dunno, I was completing plenty of functional software projects by the time I was 14. The one I'm most proud of is my rendition of Tetris which ran in real time (i.e. independent of CPU clocks) in 80x40 text mode in DOS. It was comprised mostly of the ASCII bricks and extended characters and included a repeating interlocking background pattern of Tetrads made out of ASCII pipes that took me forever to figure out how to jigsaw together cleanly.
I think those days are pretty far gone, though. Not to be all get-off-my-lawn about it, but I think the kinds of things we were doing back then were a far cry from and significantly more authentic than what most of the current crop of script kiddies are up to.