I wrote a VHS take tracking system in Basic for a guy that rented out pirate VHS tapes from the back of a van around his council estate. I was about 11 (so abou

I wrote a VHS take tracking system in Basic for a guy that rented out pirate VHS tapes from the back of a van around his council estate. I was about 11 (so about 1982), my dad used to rent tapes from him. - I'd never used whatever computer he had, just the Research Machines 380Z at school. The next was a clone of some artillery game (a bit like Gorillas.bas) on to another of dad's friend's TRS-80. I'd never used a TRS-80. Then a stock control program for my dad's pub (which got me an F in my computer studies class but saved at least $50k [I still got an A via the exam which means I scored 90%+]). I did know quite a bit about that system, being my own and all. Then one day at my local computer shop, I was watching them struggle with their pricing. Only one guy knew the prices of stuff and had employees standing in line so they could price their builds. I was friendly with him so asked if I could take his spreadsheet and make it a bit better. Come Monday morning I'd discovered Access and made a computer building form that worked over the LAN. So they gave me a job making it better. By the end it did the purchasing, retail pricing, BOM production, quote tracking, faxing, barcode printing (which we built by hand as a TTF font in Corel Draw), barcode reading (each fax had a barcode, customers arrived with them and a quick scan later the shop floor people could find their details), sales team target tracking and quite a bit more (this is all pre-internet). The Microsoft rep called the best in-house project he'd ever seen! Then I taught myself C++ to do image processing for the music video I was commissioned to make by Creation Records (a division of Sony) on the strength of the work we showed while doing video projection at raves. Knowing vbscript meant I was well placed for IIS web development but realising it was a shit platform I started looking at PHP. I got a phone call from the previously mentioned retailer asking if I knew anyone that could do PHP. I said "yeah me" and got a 5 year job building a recruitment site. In the process of doing that I taught myself Postgres and FreeBSD system administration. Now I work in an independent cinema / media centre doing all sorts of sys admin with a digital video strand, DVD authoring & duplication (this pays best!), camera assisting etc. including a 5 machine video distribution and exhibition network on mac minis using Gentoo that can double as a a video wall a la Liquid Galaxy (same code in fact - a patched mplayer which syncs via upd). tl;dr I knew almost nothing about any of the systems I have done my best work with and learned most of it on the job but got the job because I knew loads of other loosely related things.