What got you started in IT?

Tyrant1919

I haven't seen a thread such as this... yet.

I joined the Air Force and was fortunate enough to change my career field to 3C0X1 before shipping out. I was going to be an f-16 crew chief at first. Glad I made that decision :^).

So what got you started? You get dragged into it somehow? You loved computers and never stopped trying to get a job in IT?

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Claymoore

The chicks, man. I got into IT for the chicks.

msteinhilber

Just loved to tinker with computers since I was a young one. The very first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 we got from our Aunt since she had won it at some point but never used it. I must have been 8 or 9 at the time, learned a bit about BASIC. Ended up getting various 386's from my mom's work when I was in middle school, finally ended up getting one to work and put Windows 3.1 on it. Eventually convinced the parents to get a copy of Windows 95, loaded that up off a whole lot of floppies. It performed absolutely terrible, as a result they ended up taking me to one of the office stores, must have been OfficeMax I believe, and they bought a floor model Packard Bell Legend of some sort. It was terrible but from then on I really got hooked on tinkering, and messing thing up a lot which provided many learning opportunities. One that really sticks out was my mom yelling at me since I couldn't get Windows to reinstall correctly after I got yelled at when she powered the PC up and it boot to Red Hat 4.0. I tried for hours, wondering why it was booting to "Li" and that was it, finally learned about LILO on the MBR after talking to a Packard Bell support person.

Ended up taking an internship in high school at a local PC chain, continued working there through a brief stint in college, but it felt like I was learning more on the job so I took a fulltime position and postponed college. Spent about 8 years with that company working through the ranks up to running my own branch which was nice since I could dictate where to focus my resources, so I did a lot of business to business sales and service, doing consulting jobs here and there. Eventually took a spot purely working in an IT role rather than sales/consulting that I was doing at the old job.

I think the main thing that keeps me interested in IT is I love change. I can become very bored with a job in a couple of years if things don't change much. Working with technology gives me the opportunity to constantly be evolving into either different technologies all together, or into newer variations of similar technology as new hardware/software trickles down.

msteinhilber

Claymoore wrote: »

The chicks, man. I got into IT for the chicks.

"...'cause chicks dig dudes with money." -Lawrence

Bokeh

USAF as well got me into IT. Back in the 80s using 5 level tape, punch cards, DSTE, Streamliner, PDP-11, Mod 40. Moved on to DDN (Defense Data Network) which was military equivalent to the internet we know today.

I remember having to take home the high speed concentrator that got flooded in the comm center. The tech rep told me to soak it in the tub, get the mud out and then use a paint brush to clean the insides. Damn if it didnt work! 9600 baud was flying back then. Of course, I had some 75 baud teletype circuits as well to play with.

qwertyiop

I know it might seem nerdy but I was about 7 and was watching the movie Hackers on pai-per view. Ever since then ive always been interested in the field.

maumercado

qwertyiop wrote: »

I know it might seem nerdy but I was about 7 and was watching the movie Hackers on pai-per view. Ever since then ive always been interested in the field.

LOL I tough I was alone on that one, also saw war games (1989) the original, that one got me... then I started fooling around with computers, first installation was windows 3.11, got my dad pissed a lot cause I was always messing the computer up... until finally got things going...

Tyrant1919

baud...???

Alif_Sadida_Ekin

Compared to the rest of you, I'm fairly new to the IT industry.

I remember my family getting our first computer. My uncle had built a system with a 133Mhz Cyrix processor overclocked to 166Mhz (using jumpers), 64MB of RAM, and Windows 95. I can't remember the rest of the specs, but my uncle gave us this computer in 1998. I was a Freshman in high school, and I had just watched one of my teachers install a graphics card on his computer so we could play Doom and Hexen II.

Obviously, at the time, I was pretty ignorant. I thought that the graphics card was all you needed to play games. So, I convinced my mom to buy me a 3dfx Voodoo2 GPU (8MB!). It took me forever to install it, and in the meantime I managed to screw things up and keep the computer from booting. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. My mom got pissed and had to bring a friend over to fix what I had done. When it was finally up and running, I played things like Forced Alliance and Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Framerates were extremely crappy and character models were so bad, you could barely make out what was on the screen, but I didn't care. I was playing games and I thought that this was way better than my Sega Genesis.

For my birthday, my mom bought me my first "Man's PC Game". It was Alien Versus Predator. Of course I was stoked that I received such a badass game, that I couldn't wait to play it at home. Well, needless to say, that piece of crap computer didn't play the game. I spent countless hours talking with people at Best Buy (HAHAHAHA) and friends at school. I was sure that my computer should be able to play this because I had such an awesome video card. During my research, I started to learn how computer hardware works and what each device did. After weeks of talking with people who knew more than I did, I came to the conclusion that it was the processor that was keeping me from playing my beloved game.

At first, my parents were unwilling to buy me a new processor, so my video game sat there for months collecting dust. I was so desperate and so pathetic that I had resorted to staring at the screen shots on the video game box and reading as many reviews about the game when I was online at school, that I had almost convinced myself that I had pretty much played the game already (the game got really good reviews too, so this drove me even crazier).

Then the unthinkable happened. My parents bought a new Compaq desktop with an AMD K62 533Mhz processor, 64MB RAM, 40GB HD, and Windows 98. Immediately, I slipped my Voodoo2 into the computer and fired it up. I installed AVP and literally crapped myself when the first level loaded (Out of fear and happiness. That game is scary.)

With my new piece of gaming hardware, I experienced some of the best titles in the gaming industry that set new standards; Half-Life, Aliens vs Predator, Rainbow Six, Soldier of Fortune, GTA I & II, Tomb Raider, System Shock 2, and many more. It was from that moment on that got me hooked on computers. I wanted to learn everything I could so that I could feed my gaming habit. The rest is history.

I'm still a huge PC gamer today too. My current flavor of choice is Call of Duty 4 and Counter Strike: Source. I challenge any of you.

vCole

Like Alif_Sadida_Ekin, gaming is what sparked the fire.

I was 17 years old (a little less than 5 years ago...), my parents bought me a Dell Dimension 2400. (P4 @ 2.4ghz, 256mb of RAM, 80GB IDE HDD, onboard video...) Well I started playing Call of Duty. Then one day I received the "virtual memory too low" error. I researched on what that meant and went and bought another 256mb of RAM. I installed it myself and it booted on first try (thank God!

)

After that it was all down hill.

jamesleecoleman

Alif Sadida Ekin!! I'll take you up on that challenge for Call of Duty 4 (I just have to practice some)

I honestly couldn't explain why I started into IT. I do remember when my dad got the first family computer and I used to mess that thing up soo bad but I was learning from my mistakes. I had to learn fast because everyone blamed every problem the computer had on me. Later on he brought a couple more computers where I got to install a video card (geforce mx 4000) which was a birthday present. A few years later, I took cisco academy classes in highschool. That year was the year I know what I wanted to do with my life.... networking. I wasn't able to complete the academy because my teacher didn't want to teach the material for another year so that ment that I would have to attend Davenport University. I couldn't attend because my student counselor was away from the summer and the lady that was there didn't tell my counselor what I wanted to do. A few years later I did an internship at a computer recycling company. It was mostly taking apart computers and learning about the environment. Two years later, I was working for the same company where I did mostly warehouse work with all types of electronics such as audio/visual, computers, ups's, and anything that they used. I did work in the store and that was rare. While working in the store, I got to troubleshoot customer computers and replace parts

I did get the chance to build my own desktop (two years old) and I honestly had no clue to what I was doing. I just knew that each part that I brough had to match with a certian specification but it was a really good learning experience. So now I'm almost done with my AAAS in Network Administration

WillTech105

It all started with "keeping with the jones" thing. My neighbor bought a brand new no name computer with speakers, printer, monitor, software ect for the small price of 2500$. To be honest I didnt really want it, but I came home from school one day and *poof* my desk to study and do home work was now the computer desk.

I remember it having 16MB of memory, Windows 95, and it took like 5-10minutes to bootup. It was a no name brand called "Columbia" and a CD drive. I 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!) Eventually I messed with it so much I started getting X errors everytime I booted the system and eventaully traded it in years later for an eMachine with Windows 98. I just had a fascination on HOW it worked inside and outside.

Looking back I wish I kept my original machine for nostalgic reasons -- I'd love to have rip open that baby up like I did to my eMachine.

dynamik

I'll take you all on in Halo 3. I'll even take a handicap by having Snadam on my team

IT appealed to be because of the perpetual advancements as well as an innate curiosity of how computing worked behind-the-scenes. I also feel like I have more control over my career than I would otherwise. I don't have to climb the corporate ladder in tiny increments; I can make leaps and bounds (as long as I'm willing to put in the time learning). I never really made a conscious attempt to pursue an IT career; it just sort of happened.

Paperclip

messing thing up a lot which provided many learning opportunities

You have to destroy in order to create.

My parent's first computer was a Texas Instruments one that hooked up to the TV and had no access to persistent memory. You could program something and run it, but you couldn't save it to any HD nor floppy.

The second one was this. Compaq Portable Computer Yes, the keyboard latches on to the front there, protecting the monitor and floppy drives, and it has a handle so you can carry it around like a suitcase. Two, count 'em, two floppy drives. No hard drive so you still need DOS in one floppy for it to boot, then you can put groovy apps in them like WordPerfect and Zork.

Much as I did enjoy killing dwarf with axe, I didn't become seriously interested in computers until the days when I started using them for work as an end user. When I came on the scene, everything was still mostly dumb terminals that displayed text interfaces driven by some kinda Unix backend that had all the applications running on it. Over the next few years, (average organizations and not the bleeding edge or anything) started slowly giving some users PCs, running terminal emulation software so they could still get to the legacy app. The PCs were not networked in the manner we think of now, they had this card that just connected to the terminal jack so they could get to the legacy system, and had no networking within Windows. Later, everyone realized none of these systems were going to be Y2K compliant, and we migrated all of the data to new database apps on Windows servers.

My own experience started out as just an end user. As we started going more and more toward PCs, I somehow found that I naturally became the user that other users would ask questions. This was true even when I still had a dumb term on my own desk.

I guess I bought my very own first home PC around 1994. It ran Windows and had a modem, but I didn't have an internet connection. Which was just as well considering the modem was 2400 baud. I once logged on to a BBS which had an ASCII skull as the splash screen, it took it about half an hour to load. Over the next year or two I made some upgrades and got dialup internet.

Meanwhile, I found myself doing more and more desktop support at work. In about 1997 when the Y2K business was afloat, they realized they had to upgrade everything, and soon realized how much more maintenance and tweaking it was going to take (than just leaving the 486 Unix box that had been sitting there running for years, lol). So they made me full time IT (first at that company) and I'm still in it now.

I are old.

Tyrant1919

Gaming is a big part of it I guess. I had my own computer and such in High School. I barely knew what an IP was back then. I spent many hours on Starcraft. In fact when Starcraft II comes out, I'm not going to see the sun for two weeks. Half-Life, and various other games took most of my time 'back in the day'. Tie Fighter, Lords of the Realm, Warcraft II, napster... :^). I never got too 'hardcore' into IT until joining though.

murdatapes

Received my first computer in 1999 and could not get off the internet. Started visiting AOL chat rooms. Got into some beef with somebody in one of the chat rooms (talking smack back and forth) so he told me to click this link. When I clicked the link, about 3mins after, my computer rebooted and I saw my first "No operating system found." Went to the yellow pages, called this local phone tech support guy, and he told me, "you have to reinstall."

I was sold after that.

sagewalkinthere

Dune 2, if anyone remembers that game... and then Dune 2000. Man, that was fun...

Anyway, a few friends and I were going to start a video game business. I was going to be the graphics designer (just 'cause I figured it had to be easy, and I didn't know how to code anything). I took a couple of graphics classes at a community college, and then the whole video game thing fell apart, and so I started a web design business with the only other friend left over from the video game thing. I studied multimedia web design in college and then took a job as a Web administrator. A year later, I was studying for the A+ and took this job as a jr. sysadmin. Now I've got my MCP, A+, AAS, and I'm working on a MCTS.

Andretii

I do it for the pr0n

BradleyHU

murdatapes wrote: »

Received my first computer in 1999 and could not get off the internet. Started visiting AOL chat rooms. Got into some beef with somebody in one of the chat rooms (talking smack back and forth) so he told me to click this link. When I clicked the link, about 3mins after, my computer rebooted and I saw my first "No operating system found." Went to the yellow pages, called this local phone tech support guy, and he told me, "you have to reinstall."

I was sold after that.

lol....god damn son!!!

for me, i got into IT late. i've used pc's since i was a kid in elementary school, back when they had Tandys, but i was never really totally into computers. after i graduated hs in 1998, i went to JuCo, and my major there was Business Administration. I had intended to transfer to a 4 year school and get my bach in that. then one day, my pops asked me what did i intend to do with that degree. i really had no answer for him, so i thought i need to get into a major that will give me some idea of what i want to do as a future. this girl i went to hs with was in one of my classes at the time, and i asked her what her major was, and she said CIS. i asked her what it was about and if she liked it. she told, and yeah she liked, it, and i looked at it and few other majors, and i thought, lets give CIS a try. For someone who was never really into computers, i caught on to the stuff real quick, then i transferred to a 4 yr school out of state. after my first year, i worked a local pc shop here in ny. i was buildin pcs, doing installs, repairs, going to pplz houses and fixing their problems. and thats what really got me into IT.

Megadeth4168

Wow, tough question actually..... I think there were several factors that contributed to me getting into IT.

I think the first thing that got me going down the path was visiting my grandparents.... I was staying there for the summer.... They live in the middle of no where, they only had 4 channels on TV. So, when it was raining, there wasn't a whole lot to do.

That is when I found a 1981 IBM PC Jr. stored away in the basement.... They let me hook it up and see if I could do anything with it. Really, the only thing to do with it was to play with BASIC which was loaded from a cartridge. The PC came with a book on programming in BASIC and the monitor even displayed a breathtaking 16 colors! Sweet!

So, I spent a lot of time that summer making programs in BASIC. For Christmas that year my parents bought a Packard Bell... 486SX 33Mhz 4MB Ram! It had Windows 3.1. Ahhhh... Exciting times! I was so excited when I installed my first game which came with the computer. Jurassic Park. Soon afterward I installed Doom 2.

After that, I decided that there other games I wanted for the computer, but some were starting to require a CD ROM. So, my parents bought a CD-ROM drive, they had no idea what to do with it though....

So, this was my first experience with installing hardware. I must have been 12 or 13, I remember my dad coming home and getting all upset because I had the computer taken apart... It turned out pretty good though! I installed the Drive and it worked beautifully! My very first order of business after the install was to install Warcraft! What an awesome game at the time!

I think it was from that point forward that I was really interested in Computers and interested in growing up with that as a career goal.

networker050184

Man you guys are a bunch of gaming nerds

I am another one that got into the field through the military. When I signed up they asked me what kind of job I wanted. I said something high tech that I can get a job in the civillian world with. They gave me a bunch of choices and I chose Network Switching Systems Operator/Maintainer. First time I consoled into a Cisco router I was so confused. I knew I wanted to figure it all out and I 'm still trying to this day.

Mrock4

My first real exposure was at 15, when I worked at a small PC shop during the summer with a buddy. It was small-time, but I loved it. I then interned with my brother at 16 (he was a network admin at the time), and loved that even more. Joined the military and 5 years later here I am.

Just like networker I'm still trying to figure out that darn IOS stuff. No regrets though, I love this job.

It's also worth note that as a child (3-4 yrs old), I would disassemble anything electronic..clocks, radios, games, you name it. My mother was always upset because I would always not be able to get them back together. Fun times.

Shiz Stain

For me It started back when I was in middle school. I had got my first Compaq Persario (Windows ME....yeah I know you telling me) from a friend and played video games, music, and browsed the web. Never really cared for computers, but that computer had major problems and I would go outside and find my neighbors old computers and take them home, man I learned everything off of those computers by taking them apart adding/removing parts countless times. I even fixed a lot of my friends/family computers and got better at it.Then few years later I gave up on them because I couldn't afford the new stuff that was out and was just gaming 24/7 on a 16bit game.

Then I got into high school (still am) and was suppose to be an Architect major but something made me say why not give computers a try and see how far I can go. I come in class and I am out doing the kids that had the class before me last year (they went everyday for 2hrs each day) but the only thing they had against me was that they used newer technology and had experience with them while I had 0 but that changed really fast because I was like well lets see the stuff I don't know and just started learning more and more, the stuff clicked in my head really fast. Only drawback was my lack of knowledge in new technology which changed really fast ^^

Now I am doing an internship at school (senior year) and just gaining experience, man working at a school ownzzz you never know whats going to happen the next day.My interest in the IT field was personally by luck because I'm not sure what made me switch paths to go back into something I use to do.

BigTex71

I have always been interested in anything technological. I saw WarGames at the theaters when it came out (1983) and I was hooked - I was 12 years old. That year I got my first computer - a Texas Instruments TI99-4/A. It was old school - no floppy drive (hard drives were not even around for the general consumer) and I learned BASIC. A friend and I created our own Pac-Man look-alike to play on our computers. Next came the Commodore 64 and I was in gaming (and pirate) heaven!

undomiel

dynamik wrote: »

I never really made a conscious attempt to pursue an IT career; it just sort of happened.

That's pretty much the same for me too. I learned basic troubleshooting skills on my own through grade school and high school on MSDOS and Windows 95/98. Lots of those games required some pretty intricate config.sys and autoexec.bat tweaking such as Ultima 7 and Dark Sun. Then put together my first computer in college to play Quake online. I worked in my dad's department at the university doing pretty much all the IT work and web design. Then when I switched to a different college I would sometimes help out the art department with stuff. Once I dropped out of college though it was time to start paying the bills. I really didn't want to be an administrative assistant or sales person or customer service rep so I found some work doing tech support. Bounced on and off work for a while before landing a job that required me to have an A+. Picked it up easily but that really opened me up to the world of certifications. I'd always thought them way above me but discovered it not to be so. Quickly moved my way over to systems administration and discovered that somewhere around then it has turned into a career for me. I don't know how long I will stick with it or how far it will take me, but I'll be enjoying it while I can.

d00dle

i wanna work as geek squad

Driving on of those beetles, it's my dream.

eMeS

I've been around technology and computers all of my life because my father is an engineer.

I remember developing an interest in gaming in the late 70's when the Atari became popular. I don't think it was called "gaming" back then, but whatever it was we spent a lot of time doing it.

There was a "game" for the Atari 2600 called "Basic Programming". It has these stupid paddles that connected to it so you could write "programs".

My next computer following that was a TI99-4/A. As others have mentioned it booted straight into BASIC as the OS. It also took cartridges. I remember saving up about $100 just so I could get the "Expanded Basic" whatever..I think that took me to some outrageous amount of memory like 64k. I remember one of the big things about that computer was programming "sprites". The storage was on a cassette tape, and it could literally take minutes to load most of a program and a failure would occur causing the whole process to stop...

That thing went downhill quick in the 80's. Oddly enough, there are quite a few people that still use them and upgrade them and stuff. Glad to hear of the others in this thread that had some of those same experiences with the TI.

After the TI, I got an Apple IIe with 2 floppy drives. About a year or so later we added a, wait for it, 10 MB hard drive that was about $2k and about the size of a small printer these days. The Apple lasted many years and was upgraded many times. Using that Apple I had my first "online" experience, connecting to the university VAX and using ftp and telnet (if I am remembering my dates correctly). I also learned quite a bit of programming in Pascal and other languages on that computer.

By the end of high school I had many years of experience with various types of technology, so for me getting into IT was easy from that standpoint. Also, I had a family connection to someone that was director of a pretty large data center....that helped. That was 1988, and my first job was operating an IBM 3800 mainframe attached printer at night while I attended school during the day...it's been all uphill from there.

My first IBM "Clone" (remember when they were called "clones") was sometime in the late 80's. This was followed at some point by a 286, and a 386 that I built. I skipped Pentium, and started buying retail with the Pentium II's.

Does anyone remember the BBS's? I remember spending a lot of time dialing into various systems from the late 80's to the early 90's, basically until everyone had access to the Internet.

MS

Slowhand

I liked playing video games, but I had no intention of getting into computers when I was younger. Aside from my brother owning a Commodor 64 way back when, we never really had a computer at my house until 1998. In 1999, my parents bought me an eMachine, which quickly showed its drawbacks, and my friend Technomancer famously said in the fall of 2000, "I'm going to turn you into a computer-geek yet, why don't you build yourself a machine? I'll help."

Naturally, I asked for nothing but computer parts that following Christmas. I spent until the end of January getting the damn thing to work right, and I was hooked. (Technomancer didn't help.) I started taking some CIS classes at the community college while I was working on my math prerequisites for computer science, (still working on that, by the way,) and never intended to do much more than screw around with networking and IT.

FadeToBright wrote: »

After that it was all down hill.

No kidding. As of the end of this year, (eight years of working and taking occasional classes while I've been procrastinating my way up to calculus,) I'll have enough units to graduate with two CIS Associate's degrees, (one in network management and one in web and microcomputer programming,) a full year and a half before I can transfer to a four-year university to pursue my original goal, a computer science & electrical engineering degree.

KoolTrix

MAKE A WISH FOUNDATION

After receiving Chemotherapy and Bone Marrow Transplant back in Jan '99

I was only 12years old..

My Make-A-Wish Wish was for a Computer System..

DELL AMD 750 with Printer, Speakers, Digital Camera, and PapaJohns

Came with Windows 98..

Been troubleshooting ever since!

Forsaken_GA

I actually wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid. When I got closer to 18 though, and I realized how much bloody work it was going to be, it put me off a little. I'm glad I didn't though, I'm entirely too honest for it.

I'd always tinkered around with computers as a kid. Got into the BBS scene as a teenager. Became really good dealing with inter-BBS communication (FidoNet, etc). When internet access became all the rage, found out that alot of the concepts translated pretty well, and that I seemed to have a natural aptitude for networking.

It wasn't until my early 20's that I decided to go into IT. I'd never really wanted to turn my hobby into my career, but it was what I was good at, so I decided I'd be better off playing to my strengths. The only thing I regret is not going into the military.

And yeah, I'm a big gaming nerd. My dream job would be working as a network engineer for Blizzard

Bokeh

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.