Okay, I'll throw in.
I had my first contact with computers around 1981 with my gifted class's Apple ][. I believe the following year we upgraded to a ][+. After that year I was able to POKE around (and LOAD, and LIST -- get it?) with the //e systems in the school's computer lab. (I was actually banned from using them with my classes as I would often show students how to break and modify the games, like "Oregon Trail," and wound up in a lab-assistant position. This pretty much set the tone for future years.)
I believe it was Christmas 1983 when my parents, after seeing me mill around and play with the Commodore 64s and TI-99/4As on display at K-Mart, purchased a 99/4A while it had its (in)famous $50 rebate plus $50 in-store discount, meaning it wound up costing them somewhere between $20 and $60. This was meant to be for the family, but I took to it immediately. I complained about some of the games on the system and my dad's friend issued me a challenge: "if you don't like the games, then why don't you make your own?" By the summer I had created my first game in TI BASIC, "TI Jumpman," complete with attract screen, demonstration, and levels which loaded from cassette.
My infatuation with the TI continues on today, and I wrote games for it well up until 1992-ish when I did my last game in a hybrid of TMS-9900 assembly and TI BASIC. I borrowed a TI Peripheral Expansion Box and moved a lot of my programs from cassette to disk, but I still developed for cassette. It would be my adult years before I actually owned my own TI Extended BASIC cartridge.
During this time I was also exposed to a school lab consisting of Atari 800XLs and 1200XLs, and learned a good bit about how to program them. I never got the hang of player/missile graphics (I thought sprites were far superior,) so this never turned into anything more than a word processing and game platform. I managed to get my hands on a Vic-20, and just about any machine I could to sate my bottomless curiosity.
The summer of 1989, after having been exposed to BBSs, I used my lawn mowing profits to purchase a Commodore 64 and a C2N tape drive. After years of languishing on the TI cassette system, I decided I would not be stuck there with this new and powerful machine for very long. A local SysOp upgraded his Color64 BBS and sold me his Enhancer 2000 floppy drive for $25. That we the beginning of my adventure with the Commodore 64 and Q-Link, which would carry me well into the late 90s. I amassed a collection of C64s, 64Cs, a JiffyDOS-enhanced 128 and later a 128D, with 1541-IIs, 1571s, and 1581s a-plenty, along with my Minimodem C24 for my BBS and Q-Link habit (though Q-Link supported a max of 1200 baud.) Along the way I also introduced many of my friends to the wonder of the Commodore. Once I went Commodore, I moved away from game programming and into utilities, including some which were posted to GEnie and Q-Link, and what was supposed to be a BBS suite but turned into essentially a BBS kernal done in 6502 ML, which supported the SwiftLink 232 and the C128 extra keys, with unfinished plans to support the BI-80 80 column card and the 128's 80 column screen (from 64 mode.) This Commodore infatuation also continues to this day, though I have not taken it to the level that I see hardware developers have (really cool shyt out there, these days!)
During my formative Commodore 64 years, I was exposed to an IBM System/34 our school had in its student lab (two, actually.) They were retired from the school district when it upgraded to PC and Mac infrastructure. I learned OCL, menus (SDA,) RPG-II, and COBOL on this machine. After finishing up my own programs, I would often mill about the room helping other students fix their programs, and my teacher gave me my own operator status and library to keep me occupied. (I just found my SAVELIBR copies on 8" floppy... just need to put together a setup to read them.) I also participated in the First Annual New Mexico High School Super Computer Challenge, for which I learned to work in VAX/VMS, programming in Fortran 77, and had the distinct pleasure to work on Sandia Lab's brand new Cray Y-MP/2E with machine. This cemented my fixation on the command-line driven, Unix-like world.
A "side" business I ran on-and-off from the late 80s to mid 90s was 8-bit computer repair, including Commodore 64s, disk drives (including alignment,) Ataris, and so forth. The Commodore 64 was my favorite to fix. After I absorbed every hardware manual and schematic I could get my hands on, I knew it trace-for-trace, and could visualize the problem. I designed a number of expansions using the cartridge port, including an eight SID module using an Intel 3-to-8 decoder, and a 6551-based UART cartridge. I lament to this very day that I let some of my friends convince me that both were wastes of time. The actual comment was, "there's no sense to run faster than 2400 baud since the disk drives can't even keep up." (This was a big lesson learned.)
In 1992 I purchased my first Amiga 500 from a biological chemistry major who had just graduated. I actually purchased it solely for the game "Shadow of the Beast," which it did not actually come with. I did not get into programming on the Amiga, instead it became my utility and games machine. This most assuredly continues to this day, though I have started programming in C (nothing fancy, though, sadly as I don't really have much free time.) I also learned ARexx fairly well, and actually use this knowledge to write some management scripts I use on my servers under Regina REXX.
During this time (89-92-ish) I also came across the PC world and was unimpressed. Portables were cool, but I had my SX-64. DOS 3.3 failed to excite me as I had CP/M on my 128. But the time came when I had to face professional reality and I laid my hands on my first Windows computer around 1996. I worked in a retail computer shop and absorbed mound-fulls of information and experience on Windows 95, as well as the initial shipping of Windows 98. During this same short period I also set up my first Linux machine -- not so impressed, but it was pretty neat none the less. And since the shop ran on a Novell server, I got some exposure to that, as well.
At the same time I had started college and volunteered to work in the computer lab. My job was to come in in the morning, turn up the workstations, watch the NT3.1 and OS/2 servers (I really liked OS/2,) and make sure student problems were taken care of. I learned a good bit of networking in this role. Prior to starting college, I had used a local BBS to access the Internet through ftp, telnet, and irc. Someone in an IRC channel sent me a copy of a TCP/IP program for my Amiga, and it was on. The college offered free dial-up, and I pretty much had my Amiga on-line 24-7.
While I owned a Windows 98SE computer in 1999, I used it solely for a parallel port Windows-Amiga network (still have the cable I made for it.) Later, once I obtained an Amiga 4000 with an X-Surf, that became my Internet Connection Sharing machine. My first real, owned and used Windows machine came in 2000 when I purchased a Windows 2000-based laptop for me to use in my job as an ISP administrator. I had pretty much just jumped into the roll of an assistant network admin running Windows NT servers and a Solaris 2.4 machine. I later became THE Unix admin.
In 2002 I found myself a late casualty of the dot-com bust, with my company, an ISP and web portal hybrid, being sold to a local competitor. During my tenure I was a Unix admin, assistant NT and 2000 server admin, and on-site technician and technology consultant. Since all the new company wanted was the ISP customers, I took my small handful or regular consulting customers and started my business which still runs today. I had also set up a Soalris 8 server of my own and have built a hosting system around that machine, adding and upgrading as time has gone on.
So that's where I am and where I have been. It's been a fun ride, and I'm looking forward to how things continue to move. I am blessed with an intuition with technology, and I often find myself consulting to my colleagues on tricky problem situations, network security, and pseudo-forensic work and data recovery.
Technology just makes sense to me, though what I call stupid programmer tricks tend to throw that off from time-to-time. Sometimes you just look at a program or system and think, what the phuq where these guys thinking?! Mind you, it's not just programmers, engineers and designers tend to do the same thing. But all in all, it's a great world to be part of.
(I think I have another post similar to this which may contain more or less information, and the dates may have changed to protect the innocent.)
