Yup same here - I had a good physics teacher and also found I had a natural intuition for the subject.
We had a few computers at secondary school (I built some of em!) initially they were the domain of the electronics club, but it was not a formal teaching subject in my year (although it became so shortly after, even then it was not an exam course until a few years after that). So comp-sci was not really an option then. However I had the opportunity to do it at A level in FE college, and thought it might be interesting. It was also fortunate they had structured the course so that it was not assumed you would have O level going into it. (ISTR they said at the time there were probably only 5 colleges doing A level comp-sci in
1985/86 when I did it - so could be as few as 120 people in total who took that exam in the country).Sometimes its just a case of being open to the opportunities as they appear.
While doing A levels, I also took the chance to do a couple of O levels I had not been able to do before. One was in Electronics, and they had borrowed a teacher from the local HE college for that. He suggested I look at their "systems technology" course which was an engineering course with the option of a heavily comp-sci slanted stream. So rather than following the Physics route, that was what I did. Fantastic course which I loved. Acquired she that would later become SWMBO while at it :-)
That led to first job as a software engineer at GEC Sensors. Interesting stuff, crap employer, but then that led to me getting somewhat peed off with the whole concept of working for others, and also meeting the chap that would start the company with me in '91.
With the benefit of hindsight, you probably could have done the A level anyway since we are probably talking about a similar time frame.
Yup, although sometimes the flow was work out ok with a bit of paddling at the right times!
Yup, looking from the parents side, it can be quite frustrating if they have no plan whatsoever, but then one accepts that might just be karma!