I came back home from a 2-week summer camp, at 13 years old, to an IBM PCjr. Was told "We spent a lot of money on this setup, it better not be collecting dust in a few months".
From there I learned DOS, Basic, general "administration". Got a job in late high school at the small company where my Mom worked, helping out with various office tasks (filing, running the postage meter, counting inventory). They had a few PCs, and a "main" computer system (some sort of Data General "mini" I believe). They had a PC consultant that would come in for various tasks, for $350 an hour. They quickly found out they could get the same work from me for $3.50 an hour.
Eventually, the company that supplied their central computer (with a bunch of ASCII terminals hooked up) migrated over to a Unix system (AIX on an IBM RT), I saw that the interface was somewhat similar to DOS but different, and went to town. Learned the vendor's app export functions, started producing custom reports using grep/sed/join/awk in shell scripts, became a "local hero", realized I have a hero complex, so I kept pursuing tasks that would help feed my ego -- further learned C programming, and the rest is history.
Today I'm a Linux systems/network engineer that does a lot of programming on the job (now they call it devops), and also filling in as a pinch hitter for some of the development teams whenever they need someone that knows system level programming and C. Also put out a few full-stack apps using node.js on the back end with plain html5/javascript on the front end (not really into modern frameworks, that is a hole I need to fill in).
From there I learned DOS, Basic, general "administration". Got a job in late high school at the small company where my Mom worked, helping out with various office tasks (filing, running the postage meter, counting inventory). They had a few PCs, and a "main" computer system (some sort of Data General "mini" I believe). They had a PC consultant that would come in for various tasks, for $350 an hour. They quickly found out they could get the same work from me for $3.50 an hour.
Eventually, the company that supplied their central computer (with a bunch of ASCII terminals hooked up) migrated over to a Unix system (AIX on an IBM RT), I saw that the interface was somewhat similar to DOS but different, and went to town. Learned the vendor's app export functions, started producing custom reports using grep/sed/join/awk in shell scripts, became a "local hero", realized I have a hero complex, so I kept pursuing tasks that would help feed my ego -- further learned C programming, and the rest is history.
Today I'm a Linux systems/network engineer that does a lot of programming on the job (now they call it devops), and also filling in as a pinch hitter for some of the development teams whenever they need someone that knows system level programming and C. Also put out a few full-stack apps using node.js on the back end with plain html5/javascript on the front end (not really into modern frameworks, that is a hole I need to fill in).