Thanks for this wonderful trip down memory lane!

My interest started around age 7 or 8, drooling over television and magazine ads about the Amiga. I read all I could find, but didn't actually get to put my hands on a computer until I was 13, when my out-of-state uncle gave us his old Tandy 4P for Christmas. It came with a reference manual for BASIC (which I believe was the machine's 'native' environment), a disk that would boot some non-standard DOS environment, and nothing else, and I was unable to find any other software or reference manuals for it. I used that to get a pretty solid knowledge of BASIC, wrote a simple word processor and some text adventure games, and tried like hell to get my hands on an Apple II or anything else with color graphics. I never did have any luck with that, but it taught me a lot about ASCII art. I dabbled a bit in ASM assembly on early 8086 machines some years later, but never totally got my head around that.

I live in a rural area, and there wasn't a whole lot of need for programmers out here, but even out here in the woods the PC revolution was taking off, so there was always some work to be found setting up peripherals back in the day. When AOL was big, I could set up custom init strings for 12 different types of modems from memory. I learned HTML to help some people set up early web pages, but the work was sporadic and not particularly well paying, and I ended up moving into construction work to pay the bills.

Since then, I've just learned what I need to know to do what I want to do, mostly scripting and custom config files (on linux OS's for over 10 years), gcode for the 3d printer, lately getting into Verilog because FPGAs are very affordable, and I want to automate my gardens. It's been a bit of a struggle, since I actually never learned C or any of its children, but I think I'm getting my head wrapped around it well enough to start wrecking some chips :D

I'm starting to age out of the construction industry, been thinking of getting back into programming for retirement work. The languages have certainly come a long way since the late 80's!