My parents (mom and grandma) helped me buy my first PC. I had some money saved from mowing lawns and they supplemented the rest. Mom, a library director, got a bunch of DOS and Assembler and BASIC books and encouraged me to teach myself.

That turned into computer camps and helping with tech at the library and school. That turned into a computer science and aerospace scholarship to college where I learned C and Unix.

That turned into a degree in business information systems and a career in web development.

19 more years to go and I can retire.

Wait how did Computer Science and Aerospace scholarship turn into web development again?

@broseph Because the last SpaceX mission had some JS. Next question?

@broseph I got the scholarship in 1991. I had always dreamed of being an astronaut and I had applied for it under the encouragement of my science teacher. I was one of only four in my whole state who was awarded. The university was seeking to make a space sciences major and this was part of that. So I still had to declare a major and I chose CS. But my college freshman year I took way too many credits and got a bad GPA so I lost the scholarship.

I transferred to a college closer to home and switched to a business computing major partly due to my newly diagnosed dyscalculia. My badness at math was going to be a major liability if I had wanted to be an astronaut. It’s my life’s greatest regret but what could I do? Still, I’ve had a pretty good career in web design/development. Much less math than flying shuttles or calculating rocket trajectories. :)