Started out at age 10 with an apple 2 playing games.. Discovered basic from a ranger rick magazine. Parents signed me up for a basic programming class that same year. Thought it was awesome.
At 12 I bought an Amiga 500 and played games on that. Discovered C++ and taught myself to code. Made my parents an inventory management program for their shop. A couple years later I was convinced to dump the Amiga for a PC that I built myself. Played games. Still made stupid programs for D&D games we were into using c++, basic if a friend wanted to modify it later. Built machines and fixed them for friends and neighbors. Almost got caught hacking a PBX system and decided I should stick to computers and not play with phones.
Got to IRC through a guy in another city that found out forwarding calls to certain mobile only numbers were free. So he set up some modems and created a gateway to the internet. You had to dial in at 2400 baud and then use PPP to get connection g then telnet to his Unix box. Ran a irc client and learned that there are really mean people in this world and some of them want to do bad things to you in person.
Doom was king. We had a blast playing that via modem connections and would have tournaments with kids from the high school in the city next to us.
Dropped out of high school the year my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Decided the whole planet sucked and all I wanted to do was play games and listen to Metallica.
Ended up getting a job programming at 19 because a guy felt sorry for me. I was there 4 years, left to do a computer operator position at a plastics plants, went back to the first company's for another 3 years to get their next product out. Then left there to go to repair shop to do in home PC and office PC repair. Went to school for computer science while I did that. Landed a job half way through it doing more programming. In my 9 year career there, turned into their IT manager fixing the network, servers, managing a help desk staff, and team of developers.
I graduated, but then left that job to just be a tech support guy at a place closer to home. I'm at the same company, but I'm back to managing the team of tech support people while also taking care of all our internal systems as well as our mini data center for our hosted saas customers. My glide through a few years job has been the most stressful and challenging, so most nights I'm playing BF4 or GTA 5.
I really wish my day job wasn't mostly windows. I've grown to love Linux over the years. I used Slackware, fedora, red hat back when there was no enterprise version, and Suse. I try to get some stuff in Linux or BSD, like pfsense and asterisk, but its not enough. Lol
Sorry for the long post.