A dusty old Apple II from my uncle. I was a super-nerd at the time and my parents couldn't afford to buy me a computer. This was around '92? Anyway, it came wit

A dusty old Apple II from my uncle. I was a super-nerd at the time and my parents couldn't afford to buy me a computer. This was around '92? Anyway, it came with a manual for Lisa assembler. It had some built-in graphics subroutines which I thought was pretty neat. I just punched in the stuff not really understanding the implications of it all. Later we got another second-hand computer, an 80386. It was around '94. For the first time I had a relatively decent computer. That thing lasted me until around '98. I spent summers reading BASIC manuals and copies of Byte and Compute from the library. I also bought a modem for the thing and started BBS'ing and learning programming from other people. My first email address was through my local BBS which had it's own link. This was my favorite time with computers. My entire family thought that I would "get into computers." I never did until I was 23. In high school I had gotten into punk and metal and liked playing in bands. After high school I tried to start a label. I thought I could leverage file-sharing where other labels were trying to shut it down. Well that failed in a big way and I was out of work and living off of coffee and toast in a crappy room in some dumpy part of the city (I had taken off from my small town and moved to the city to put myself through college without any money or a place to stay.. that was tough, but I took audio engineering which turned out to be the wrong thing to do). That's when a friend of mine had a cousin at an ISP who was looking for someone to help maintain their hardware and build websites. I downloaded a few manuals on PHP, read a few tutorials, aced the interview and 5 years on I'm loving my job. I'm now mainly program in Python and Perl and like to read textbooks on maths and computer science on the weekends. Sort of like I used to when I was a geeky kid that everyone picked on. It took a while, but eventually I got there.