As stupid as it sounds, my first introduction to programming and "hacker" culture was AOL chat rooms, people used "scrollers" which would paste ascii art into A

As stupid as it sounds, my first introduction to programming and "hacker" culture was AOL chat rooms, people used "scrollers" which would paste ascii art into AOL chat rooms at the press of a button and I wanted to know how that was done so I learned some Visual Basic with the functions AppActivate and SendKeys. I was 12 and in 6th grade at the time. After being kicked off of AOL for that and other DoS related crap related to these silly "progs" I was making, I had to get a different local dialup ISP and find a new way to chat (IRC). People used to send the IRC CTCP "VERSION" command to see what IRC client you were using, and the folks in the leet haxor chats such as #2600 would make fun of you for being a newb if you were on mIRC (and thus Windows) and not Linux or *BSD. So I had to figure out Linux so I could be cool, which was kindof a pain in the ass in 1997 still. Hardware support for things like ethernet and video cards often required recompilation of the linux kernel just to get it working etc. I learned a lot from that and often stayed up until 6 in the morning much to my parents concern and dismay. But luckily for me, who did poorly at school for lack of interest and didn't go to college, the computer/coding thing turned out OK for me. I'm 36 and work at one of the big companies and make a pretty good living as an SRE. Somewhat ironically, I work at Microsoft now.