I’m going to date myself a little here, but my first computer was a TI-32. It had cartridges for games like Q-Bert and Frogger and such, but the one that really captured my imagination was Basic. I was so young, I couldn’t do much more than print a string in a loop, but I remember being utterly fascinated by the fact that I could ‘program’ the computer to do what I wanted.
From there, my parents (dad especially) made sure that we usually had a computer that was pretty close to whatever was the best thing available at the time, and we always had whatever the best flight simulator was (he was an air traffic controller). When I went off to college to pursue my degree in music performance, naturally I took several computers with me to goof around on. I spent more time playing Quake than I did practicing ..
At some point, ID released the source to Quake (QuakeC) that allowed customization of the engine, and I spent a _lot_ of time messing around with that just for fun. A friend of mine in the CS program graduated a year ahead but knew the sorts of things I programmed in QuakeC and when I graduated, offered me a job at his company. The pitch was basically “We need somebody who knows networking, some programming, can learn, and has no formal training so we can pay them dirt.” Hard to pass _that_ up right?
I’ve been in the industry ever since and am now taking the time to go get the CS degree I never got in the first place .. almost done!
