What got you started in IT?

amplex

I've spent most of my life (given great opportunities) underachieving. My grandfather was an engineer and my father has been into computers since you could put them together from kits and before (Imsai, etc) i.e oldschool.. So I was brought up watching green/amber text scroll down CRTs.. I've been into PC's for as long as I can remember. I took an early interest in BASIC programming with help from my dad, and worked on GI Joe text adventure games etc (gaming seems to be a common interest in getting us males into PCs!), and had a TI-99-4A as my first PC sometime before 10 yrs old, rom basic, cassette storage unit. Then around 11 or so I finally got my dads original IBM PC-XT 8088! This was a huge step up as it actually had a hard drive (10 megs, huge!) and 640k of memory. I took a pascal class @ a CSU college (part of GATE I think?) in 7th grade, got a 286 my dad got from work (which was FLYIN FAST @ 11mhz or so? 40meg hd 4m ram), this was the time period where 486's were $4000. I then for my 12th or 13th birthday put together my own 386 from parts I got for Xmas/yard work! I was into the whole BBS/programming/ANSI thing for a few years, met a few kids in a local BBS club, before our rural town actually had dialup access to the 'internet' in 95 or so, and games started to get much better, and be playable over landline (doom!). I also started to get way into music picking up piano @ 9, guitar at around 12, tracking (Modtracker/ScreamTracker/Impulse Tracker eventually) and music production that required no special hardware. No one has ever really liked this music too much but I kept up anyway.. amplex

I slowly migrated to networking/web programming for a short while, until about 98, when I loaded up redhat linux, ran into my efnet IRC chat rooms, got rooted instantly, became a script kiddy, learned C/C++/SH scripting, took a year of Java/C++/C in Unix/other remedials @ CSU Sacramento, which after being very bored (and playing a lot of Q2Expert CTF , I dropped out of school and basically took 10 years off working crap jobs all over; painting highway lines!/data entry/accounting/insurance/SQR with my dad briefly/general office/etc), not really working towards anything (except fantasizing about releasing music commercially), feeling kind of hopeless in the end, always comparing my self to my fathers' successes which seem that he hardly had to work for, because the enthusiasm came so naturally for him, and he was a math major/straight A student/somewhat of a genius. Plus I developed somewhat of a social avoidance in my early 20s, easy for me, being such a weirdo =] Then I had a daughter 3 years ago, and last year a friend helped get me an 'IT' contractor type job about a year and a half ago running Cat5e, implementing net devices, installing new stores, troubleshooting POSs, etc. So here I am studying for things like A+ 602 (just passed my 601 today!), to try to get my life back on track financially, knowing full well that I could have done this 10 years ago and been SO much better off, but sometimes the only way to learn is the hard way!! It does feel good to take a test and pass but at the time of dropping out of college, I just lost interest completely in doing the standardized thing. I felt as though I had learned everything I knew on my own (95%), and that a college degree/other standardized testing would only slow me down (lazy thinking). How wrong I was, thinking that my skills would get me into any job! It only opened the door to working crap temp jobs, sitting around on UI, playing wow 10 hrs a day lol.. There is no substitute for experience, but certifications/degrees are next in line, and show an aptitude for learning.

With my past history, if I owned a large IT business, I would never hire someone with my track record unless they were extremely experienced. The fact that I even took the A+ is kind of embarassing to me because I know it means so little to the type of employers I am looking to impress, except as a starting point, but at least after taking the real test I realized how much more comprehensive it is than I originally thought (note: VCE's even dated 2008 are nothing like the real thing!!). Net+, MCSE, CCNA or CCENT would be things I would be more proud of having at this point. But I'm tired of having all this knowledge and experience and having no doors open. I just want a good job in a stable industry, so I can afford a house and be able to support my family the way I would like. Its nice to have forums like this around to see what others have been through and share information on these valuable and life-changing certifications/work experiences. =]

ilcram19-2

when i was 10 my mom made me take a computer course for kids, i spent most of the time playing but after 3 months i was able to take computers apart and the course was about
DOS and windows 3.1 lol

Forsaken_GA

Bokeh wrote: »

Fidonet? Thats a blast from the past. I remember when BBS were big back in mid to late 80s, early 90s. Folks who had multi-line BBS from their houses were considered rich, lol. I remember when the first 1200 baud modems hit the market, and folks thought those were screamers. Then 2400 came out and you thought you were in nirvana.

My ex told me way back that owning a computer for home was stupid, and using it to get online even worse. Now she is one of the biggest gaming geeks around.

Yup, BBS'es had most of the things we take for granted now. Online chat, discussion forums for folks that share the same passions, online gaming. FidoNet was my introduction to internetwork communications, and was really what I enjoyed most about the BBS scene. I could talk to geeks all around the world. BellSouth and GTE loved me back in those days, my phone bills were astronomical.

It's a neverending source of amusement to me that all the things people looked at me like I was strange for doing have become so commonplace in today's society. It's also sort of annoying that my underground hobby has become decidedly mainstream.

Beats working a real job, I guess

RomBUS

It started in I believe in 10th or 11th grade, I really started to ponder what I wanted to do with my life, at first I thought I was going to be a creative writer or an author of some sort. One of the teacher in my high school kept pressing that I had a knack for wirting but I was better in math historically. I had a bvery basic knowledge of computers around 11th grade, just tinkering around and helping friends and family fixing simple computer problems/questions. Then 12th grade came around and I took this A+ vocational class from my high school, very hard class to get into but they accepted me. This is when I really fell in love with computers, networking, troubleshooting the works. I decided to go into IT after a representative from a technical school talked about the advancements in IT and I immediately got excited and said THATS WHAT I WANT TO DO.

e24ohm

What got me started in IT?
My parents worked for DOD in the early 80s, so I grew up with a Commodore 64, and an IMSAI 8080 in the house. I learned how to program BASIC; however, really didn’t enjoy programming. The tape drive system has to be the most remember able moments of my Commodore years.
(fast forward to the 90s) Started really getting into tech and telecommunications in the mid nineties; however, by that time I was in school for mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering is my career at the time, but IT/computers was a hobby, that I enjoyed to no end. Long story short I went back to school for Electrical Engineering and the birth of my IT career started.

dynamik

d00dle wrote: »

i wanna work as geek squad Driving on of those beetles, it's my dream.

Other places do that to be cute too, and I used to work for one. Trust me, you're not missing anything...

aordal

It's as far away from milking cows as I could get.

jryantech

I placed degrees that can potential earn you $30,000-$100,000 a year in a hat.
Came up with Information Technology.
Damn. I was really hoping for Massage Therapist.

Neeko

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

It's a neverending source of amusement to me that all the things people looked at me like I was strange for doing have become so commonplace in today's society. It's also sort of annoying that my underground hobby has become decidedly mainstream.

Beats working a real job, I guess

Interesting thought that. I used to love chat rooms as a kid, but it was never for purely social reasons as there was some fascination at the whole process. I guess that’s what sepearates us from the socialites who spend all day on facebook. We actually appreciate the technology, or at least grew to appreciate it at some point.

I’ve never been your typical computer geek, and I’m still not compared to most IT guys. I used to play consoles as a kid, my older brother had a Comodore 64, and when the Internet first surfaced I got hooked on WWF and MSN chat but was never into gaming or anything. I was able to use computers in a general sense because of my addiction to browsing online, but nothing further than that.

After school I went to college and started maths, biology, history and computing. I lasted 3 months. After trying some other career paths and realising I had no interest in anything and was getting no where, I decided to go back to college to do a dedicated IT college course – a networking course because I was interested to know how the Internet worked, since I was using it every day. It was a risk because for all I knew I wouldn’t even like real IT work. My course was a year, our tutor signed off sick for most of it and I learnt barely anything. Still at this point I knew I had intelligence but had no real interest in a specific career path. All I knew was that I was relatively happy when it came to IT. I had no other options so I signed up to Uni. In the space of a a year and a half I’d gone from carrying bricks for a living to being at Uni. Still at this stage I had never built a PC, never installed Windows or really knew anything about networking.

In my first year at Uni I didn’t even know what ping was. Someone was talking about pinging a machine and I just thought ‘sh*t I’m really out my depth here’. That was only 2 and a half years ago. For the first 2 years of my degree there was only one unit on networking, which didn’t offer too much as the degree is a framework and heavily concentrated on software development. At the end of my first year I gathered I was interested in networking and needed to actually know something to get anywhere so I started teaching myself, and once I had the basics studied parts 1 and 2 of ccna at an academy at Uni in the summer between semesters. It was a rush course but it was the big eye opener I needed. Real networking, good reading material and hands on work. I loved it.

It was quite a rushed course I couldn’t really absorb much, but things like subnetting etc I had the basics with. My second year at Uni as said still only one networking unit which only covered basic stuff that my ccna 1 & 2 studies had covered. I continued to do self study with a growing interest and am now have almost finished my 3rd year work placement as a network analyst, am close to getting ccna which I’ve been doing self study for in the evenings after work. Im set to take the 2nd exam in a few months. My final year at uni is 75% networking, covering topics that the previous years did little to prepare us for. I’m glad I took it upon myself to work towards ccna and opt for a placement because I feel plenty prepared now. I’m planning on doing my project testing and comparing convergence between routing protocols – rip, ospf, eigrp and bgp. I can safely say I know what they meant by ‘pinging’ now haha.

Been a steep learning curve, I’m still not a geek as such and don’t think I ever will be but I think I have enough interest to make a career. I certianly enjoy it more than anything else I’ve tried.

shodown

Started in the military working missle system and some of the associated gear used HP-Unix. Well nobody wanted to do the work so I got tasked with running a small unix network with 5 machines based on a hub, but still need to know networking to get it all to work like using default gateways and getting the information to routers.

Next I was at another command and just took a position as a network admin working windows servers and Unix servers still small no more than 10 users total. After being there I decided IT was for me and I kicked the multimeter and Oscope to the curb.

Bl8ckr0uter

WillTech105 wrote: »

II remember I looked all over that Windows 95 CD (those 2-5 minutes video clips with crappy resolution) and horrible games (i rmember this bad first person bumper car game) and installing games like Battle Chess, Orgeon Trail II, and The Time Warp of Dr.Brain (which I still have them and their boxes thank you!)

Oregon Trial II = Classic !!!:D

Pash

Errrrm im a nerd.

But seriously i got converted to the ways of the PC tech from early ages such as many of you, here in the UK we had a famous brand of affordable home pc's called amstrad, used to love typing in park hard drive (or something like that) before turning my dads amstrad off, who remembers commander keen? That was a good game.

I got into pc gaming on the original half life in 99/00, got hooked to that game called counter strike and went from a dial up connection to cable broadband soon after. Been gaming ever since, beats watching the crap on tele.

Was stuck in retail and actually got offered a management role but I realised I was bored out of my skull, was sitting in the work canteen there and read an IT training advert for CCNA and MCSE (didnt know anything about these certs then) at a training centre called Britannia IT in Kilburn London. I left my job in retail and thankfully my grandad decided to help me out financially (because I never went to university he saw this as a good progression into a technology career, he spent 50 years working for the BBC as an engineer). I spent 2 years attending various courses at my training centre, i got desktop 70-270 done and then jumped to the CCNA because I found networking interesting. I passed that in dec 06, got a job two weeks after for a japanese IT firm in London and started Jan 07, been here ever since and I am grateful for my foot in the door and everything I have learnt.

Thanks for your stories guys!

gorebrush

I feel old reading some of these. And i'm only 26.

I started with computers at the age of 4. My dad bought our first computer, it was a BBC Micro B. I don't know what it was, but I simpy HAD to know what was on the screen, what it was telling me, and what I could do with it. The love affair began, and I was absolutely hooked. I was that interested in the computer, I learned to read with it because I was so interested in what it was trying to tell me "DISK ERROR 0.0" or whatever it was.

From there I had grown up with it, and moved on to a BBC Master computer. At school, kids would come in from the next door class and ask me to go and help them with their computer as it had crashed. I would fix it, and get 5 minutes away from my current lessons! I had earned quite a reputation already, and I was still a youngster.

In about 1991 we had our first PC. It was an absolute MONSTER.

IBM Model 55 SX/2
386 SX 16MHz
2MB RAM
60MB Hard Disk
512Kb Graphics Adapter

It ran Windows 3.0 and had DOS 3.3 installed on it. Seriously, I loved that computer.

From there it was a natural progression into hardware building and tinkering with Operating Systems, something which is still a passion of mine today, even after 22 years of working with computers.

I've got experience with practically every Windows OS since Windows 3.0, including NT 3.5 and 4, 2000, and so on.

I went to University and got a degree in Business Information Technology, and when I left there I went to work for Local Authority as an Intranet Co-ordinator. I spent the next two years bouncing around various temporary posts, before finally deciding that public sector was just not working out. In the meantime I had completed an MCSA, and in January of 2006 became a Systems Administrator for a company in the Steel Industry.

In April of 2006 I became an MCSE shortly before my 23rd birthday, accomplishing a dream which I had long long held of becoming one.

Fast forward to June 2008, I moved to another company to become a Senior Systems Administrator, and completed two MCTS, CCNA and started a CCNP.

The future? Wow, I don't know. I've spent too much of my early 20's studying and concentrating on my career, and I have to admit I think my personal life probably wasn't as fun as it could have been. However, I am in a very fortunate position.

I'm 26, I make £30K a year, I have no debt whatsoever, and have a good career already.

From here though, there are a lot of big things going on in my personal life that have slowed down my certification progress somewhat lately, but i'll get back round to it when I am ready

Life is about being happy as well as having a good career!

David

LTParis

In January 1996 I was reflecting on the past jobs I had done; volunteer EMT, DJ, McDonalds, etc. and made a decision that my life and career was going nowhere. I was living in Northern NY at the time, a wasteland of no jobs and terrible unemployment. I had no college degree since the two attempts I went to college failed from poor choice in a major or financial roadblocks.

It was at that time I decided to let the chips fall where they may and moved to DC on a whim. I crashed at a friends place and with a train ticket and $200 in my pocket I moved.

I started hunting around the Washington Post after the big President's Day snow storm, trying to figure out what to do for employment. I started to play off of my "geek" past where I took Turbo Pascal classes in high school, played with my sisters AT&T 8088, had a C64, learned BASIC on a Apple IIc/e, and overall just really enjoyed technology. I saw a help desk job in Tysons Corners (Northern Virginia for those that don't know) for a company that was outsourced for Canon printers and scanners. They trained you on the products so I knew I could quickly pick it up. Got the job and from there I kept on finding jobs that enriched my mind and my resume. I worked from help desk > pc support > network support > web design and development > network architecture.

I am lucky that I happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and took many risks in my career, but it has paid off for me. I have a robust technical background 13 years in the making now and still enjoy the IT life very much. As some may have seen from my posts elsewhere on this forum I am getting back into the certification groove after a 10 year hiatus, and if time permits I may try to get the degree that eluded me before, if anything for self satisfaction.

rsutton

When I was 10 years old I wanted to be a chef. When I was 12 my parents bought our first computer, a 386 and I fell in stary eyed love. After a few years with that dinosaur I had discovered, for the first time, where my true skills were. I havn't looked back since.

billscott92787

When I was 12 I started messing around with computers, learning the GUI interfaces, started taking them apart, fixing things. To be honest my mother purchased an HP computer. Needless to say, it was sent back about 4 times to be fixed, and there was always a reason that I was taking it apart. After that, I just started learning more and more, and kept working to get into the IT field. Now, I'm studying for my CCNA and here I am.