I started out doing hardware, as you say. Lots of bad soldering (initially). Expensive smoke and shitty chips from Radio Shack that appeared to have had their m

I started out doing hardware, as you say. Lots of bad soldering (initially). Expensive smoke and shitty chips from Radio Shack that appeared to have had their magic smoke removed prior to being shipped to stores in packaging that definitely was not anti-static. Capacitors that blew up into confetti, diodes that became LEDs for a single, glorious instant. Poking around in the back of old teevee sets and somehow avoiding being electrocuted or thrown against the wall by 30KV waiting patiently in a circuit where the bleed resistor had cracked. Realizing that you're going to need another paper route to afford the buffer chips and board work. Learning that manufacturer data sheets are sometimes full of lies. Redesigning the support circuitry for the CPU to remove just one more chip. Failing a bunch of high school courses because you were writing a BASIC interpreter (in anticipation of working hardware, someday) instead of doing homework. Oh, I built a working computer, too. That was fun. But when at the end of that project you've got a processor and some RAM and a display sitting there in front of you, well, you realize that you don't really know what to do with the rig. Now what? Then I realized that I could do far more damage in software (at scale) than with hardware (just one-off workbench class disasters). And so . . .