In college I worked as a phone dispatcher for a company that had a slick homegrown system for managing accounts, billing and dispatching. It was faster, fuller-

In college I worked as a phone dispatcher for a company that had a slick homegrown system for managing accounts, billing and dispatching. It was faster, fuller-featured and more intuitive than the commercial systems I'd seen at the time. When the dev swung by the office one day I chatted with him and was surprised to learnt that he'd gotten his start coding in prison as well. He hadn't used computers at all before being incarcerated, but got hooked in his first class when he typed something at the command line and got an error in response. He muttered something like "I'll show you, stupid machine" and committed then and there to getting the device to do what he wanted it to. Ten years later he had a successful business building and maintaining systems like the one I was using for small businesses all over the area.