I also started with QBasic (with no internet connection). Built a small choose your own adventure. Then I wanted to build a "password program" that would ask fo

I also started with QBasic (with no internet connection). Built a small choose your own adventure. Then I wanted to build a "password program" that would ask for a password before you could get "into the computer". I heard somewhere (schooljard) that you can put so called exe files into a file called autoexec.bat and they would start first. Alas QBasic could not build these magical files. I wnt to a store that had computer books and software in their music CD section and saw a huge Turbo Pascal book. It came with a floppy disk that had Turbo Pascal on it and 12 year old me was sitting on the floor of this store in front of the pop music CDs of the day and leafing through the book to see if you could build exe files :P Lots of begging parents later I owned the book, struggled through it and build some small things. The interesting thing is I never programmed that much but was always fascinated by what amazing things existed. I guess I mostly liked reading about technology and using it a bit. I then mostly went through a phase of playing games on the family computer, completely destroying it when I tried to install Suse-Linux from a CD from some magazine (I was still very young and didn't fully understand what an operating system even is but the article made it sound very cool). My next phase of interest was when I discovered the Llama book and O'Reilly books in general. Programmed some Perl, picked up some other languages but never really build anything worth noting. And then the last experimental phase was when I stumbled upon "Smashing the stack for fun and profit" and into the huge field of computer security. Went through a lot of "crack mes" etc. and just had a fun time. After that I started to understand how things worked a little more and went about it in a more structured way that eventually lead to a CS-ish degree. But I still have the fondest memories of the time when I basically knew nothing and was just fiddling around and then pooof sometimes cool stuff happened, sometimes stuff broke :P So yeah tl;dr...if it wasn't for stumbling onto Basic some day I might have never gotten interested in anything related to computers.