How I got interested in computers

Note: This page is woefully incomplete.

old Heathkit computer kits… I was not allowed to have one (my parents didn't want to put out that much money)... this was back in the 70's. However, I did play around with electronics here and there, and built a tone generator for a shortwave radio, etc.
I saw a contact email address listed on some product literature, and thought it incredibly foolish that someone would use a computer to send pretend mail to someone else.
took my first FORTRAN at LSU in 1982
took Pascal in 1986 or so
went in half with T. H. for an old 386 around 1996, but T. H. bought out my share when I moved out of his apartment
got an old 286 in late spring of 1997
immediately upgraded that box by purchasing a 386 board and ram from a used parts place
played with OS/2 warp 3 for a few months, on an old 80 MB hard drive
put up an eggdrop bot in late 1997, running on my ISP's shellbox
upgraded to a 486 board sometime in 1998
finally made headway with OS/2 in 1998
the 486 board and half my peripherals burned out in perhaps November 1998. I suspect I had too many hard drives installed, and when I landed my first CD-ROM, the thing croaked after 2 days :-(
Got new enough parts together for a new box in december 1999 (30 days without a PC? I almost lost my mind over it)
got a job at a hack shop putting together K6-2 266 MHz machines for the christmas rush in December 1998
started working at Bayou on January 2, 1999 and immediately started playing with a box truck full of old parts
wired Bayou with cat 5 cable
upgraded all PCs to modern hardware and Windows 95 in spring 1999
took a spare Pentium 233 box and installed SuSE Linux 6.2 on it, which I purchased from CompUSA
perhaps 2 weeks into my Linux project, I realized that all of the configuration files looked exactly like the eggdrop config files I had been editing. The light comes on at this point :-)
got advice in fall 1999 from Scott Harney who was at that time the sysadmin for Fast Band, on how to administrate the SuSE as a dialup router for Bayou. He metioned starting NOLUG with friends and invited me to come out
several months later I attend my first NOLUG meeting, and am totally hooked on Linux from this point on.
Hired on at Fast Band (thanks, Scott) and begin leaving Bayou in May 2000
went full time at Fast Band a month or two later and completely left Bayou
Fast Band went belly-up on October 1, 2000 and I'm out on the street. It's a long hard road at this point, trying to find another computer gig.

To be added:

mainframe
junker that Dean gave me
advanced video