As as Soviet kid growing up in the 80s, there was not a whole lot of personal computing going on. Around '91 I entered a new school, which offered informatics c

As as Soviet kid growing up in the 80s, there was not a whole lot of personal computing going on. Around '91 I entered a new school, which offered informatics classes. My first exposure was with the Soviet "Corvette" computers (not nearly as cool as this sounds). I still remember my first homework - to write, on paper, a set of instructions for a drawing program to draw a house (things like LINE and CIRCLE commands with coordinates). Everyone came back with simple 6-10 line programs of basic 2D-shaped homes. I typed in three pages worth of commands that output a 3D house, complete with door, windows, chimneys, plus a sun, some clouds, etc. I was hooked. Soon I transitioned into a more advanced computer room with a bunch of 286s with 2MB of RAM and no hard drive (system floppies FTW!), where I picked up Turbo Pascal. My parents eventually got me a ZX Spectrum computer for more coding (though I mostly played games). We moved to the US just as Internet started taking off. I didn't know anybody else technical, so browsing PC magazines in the library was my main source of tech knowledge. One of them contained a disk with Juno software, a free email provider. Had some brief adventures with various mailing lists, including one that returned HTML given a URL. I didn't know what HTML (or WWW at large) was back then, but somehow managed to open my first response from www.idsoftware.com (via Juno's email) in Internet Explorer 2 that was bundled with Windows 95. The website was mostly images (I believe it was an image map), which obviously didn't load, but the whole thing clicked for me then and it wasn't long until I found an ad-supported free internet provider and the rest is history. Actually had my family set up with free internet till I went off to college, thanks in part to various ad-hiding hacks. Oh, last ad-related anecdote from the early Internet days. There was a company called AllAdvantage that paid you as long as you had an ad displayed while you were browsing the web. Various ad clickers and hiders proliferated at the time, so I was even able to make a little bit of side cash. Not feeling great about it now, but I was young and this was truly a wild, wild west.