The laptop was my roommate's, borrowed for a weekend trip that got cancelled at the last minute, and it ended up being the machine I wrote my very first program on, mostly because it was the only one within arm's reach.
Your first day
Open a free online Python editor, such as the online compiler on programiz.com, with no account or installation needed, and delete any code already in it. Type print('hello') exactly, straight quotes and brackets included, and press the Run button. You'll see it appear in the output panel in under five minutes. Then change the word to something else and run it again, just to see that you're the one controlling what happens.
Most people get stuck on a tiny syntax error early on, a missing quotation mark, a misplaced comma, and assume it means they're not cut out for this. It doesn't. That exact kind of error is something every single programmer hits constantly, on day one and twenty years in, and it isn't a signal about aptitude at all.
The thing most people miss
I believed coding required understanding how computers work at a deep level before writing anything real, that skipping straight to typing commands would just be memorizing nonsense. What actually changed my understanding was making a program do something visible and correct almost immediately, with zero understanding of what was happening underneath any of it.
Once I saw that, I stopped trying to fully understand each concept before moving on and started running small changes constantly just to see what happened, learning from the result instead of from theory first.
A misconception worth correcting
Copying a working example and changing it isn't cheating or a sign you haven't really learned anything. It's how most people get their first programs running, and the changing part is where the actual learning happens.
About a week in, I wrote a short program from a blank editor without copying it from anywhere, at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea beside me, and it ran correctly on the first try. Out of curiosity I compared it afterward to a tutorial's version of the same program, and mine was structured almost identically without my having copied it. Variables, storing a value under a name so the program can reuse and change it, are the next thing worth learning.