In the mid-late 90's, our family got a computer. None of use really knew much about them, but Mom saw it for sale at some rent-to-own place and picked one up. I

In the mid-late 90's, our family got a computer. None of use really knew much about them, but Mom saw it for sale at some rent-to-own place and picked one up. It came with a free AOL trial and before you knew it we were on the Internet. It was really cool to chat and meet people from all over. It felt like an exclusive club and I soon found myself addicted. It was common to occasionally get in little arguments with other users, especially other young teens. One of these incidents resulted in me being kicked offline by one of the users. When I dialed back up I asked them how they had done it and he was cool enough to show me how to use a punter - a program to 'punt' people offline. From there I learned about other 'progs', programs that ranged from scrolling endlessly in chats to the more nefarious that allowed one to steal passwords. This intro to "hacking" led me to my first foray into programming with Visual Basic 5, so I could write my own progs. Eventually I graduated from "hacking" on the AOL service and started reading anything I could find about real hacking. At the time it was believed you couldn't hack on Windows, so I _had_ to learn Unix. Started with some free shell accounts, learned some of the CLI and quickly got banned. I realized my own option was to run it myself. Found out about Redhat Linux and eventually got it to boot. I ran into so many issues that required constant troubleshooting. This sort of led me to fall in love with fixing things instead of just trying to break them. Just stayed with it for the next couple decades.