Even as a young child I was interested in how things worked. I was lucky enough to receive a battery operated toys for birthdays and christmases. Often after the initial interest wore off I would take to these with a screw driver and pliers to see what was inside and they actually worked. Eventually as I got older and my parents got wise to this they started getting electronic kit sets from David Reid or *** Smith. I was also an avid reader of Electronics Australia issues at our local library. 

When I reached high school in the early 80s personal computers were just hitting the market. We had access to a TRS-80 and then a whole classroom of BBC micros.  The rest of my adult career has been based on this foundation.  Looking back I feel like this was a golden era in getting kids involved in creating stuff with technology, and in the past few years I think this is happening again. 

With the Raspberry Pi foundation and the increasing emphasis on STEM in schools I'm encouraged to see more kids creating with technology rather than just being consumers of technology.  Now with a young daughter and son, I'm pleased they are inquisitive and interested in how to build things and how things work. We take every opportunity to explore and encourage discovering and creating new gadgets and gizmos.

About 3 years ago I was watching "how to" videos when i came across "How to build a gamecube portable" and as i was watching it i found i was unable to look away from the screen as the person took the gamecube apart and started to take ports off, cutting it down, and soldering wires. I got hooked to it and thought to myself "I have a gamecube in my closet gathering dust since the video port was all busted up." So as soon as the video was over i started to take apart the gamecube, But since i didn't have the right tools i used the method that was used in the video which was to take a pen and melt it to be able to form around the screw to take it apart. After i took it apart i went and bought a soldering iron, 3 inch screen, small mp3 speakers for the volume control, camera batteries, and a thing of plexiglas. But after a while i fried the mother board. I didn't think that this was gonna be so I gave up but that incident make me love electronic so right after that i remembered that i have a gameboy advance sp that didn't charge and the hinge was broken so i took it apart and made a new case for it, took the charge port off and soldered a different power port to it moved the volume control and power switch and i put in some small speakers to replace the one that was in there at first. I made the case out of a sheet of plexiglas and bent the corners with a candle. I had just bought a dremel but didn't have much control over it so i just used files and a box cutter to shape it and a drill for holes. At the time when i painted it i was really impatient and kept touching it. But i still plan on making the gamcube portable as soon i can get a wasp fusion,

When i was 8 or 9 i had a friend who was an electronics enthusiast (and it wasn't easy to be a such person in Poland in 80s - mainly due to lack of an easy access to parts). He was older than me - but always when i visited him i was fascinated with electronic parts he had. They were so colorful and looked quite magical (especially leds - mainly red back then ;-). Once he showed me a handmade radio - it was an UHF receiver built based on transistors and one IC ("power" amplifier). From that moment the only thing i wanted was a radio built on my own. I got a schema from him. Collecting parts took me a while (there was no Internet back then - so i have to rely on a local store). But after few months i was ready to start buliding my own radio. With a help of the colleague i made it - it was a medium wave receiver built with two transistors and an earphone. It was tuned with a trimmer capacitor (i couldn't get a real variable capacitor). Medium waves were chosen only because a coil was easier to wind than for long waves - and you still could hear something.

At this moment, when i heard first cracks from the earphone, i became a fan of electronics - and i'm still are. Times have changed - now I can buy all, even most sophisticated components, and build whatever I want to - but i still remember my first radio (i think i still have the earphone i used).

I was in high school, when I was invited to play a game of chess, during our lunch hour, in one of the open classrooms.

Turns out that that classroom was also the computer lab. And that was it.

It was an HP 2000F timesharing mini-computer that you programmed using BASIC.  The old Lear-Siegler ADM3A terminal were painfully slow - if you were lucky you got to work on one of the 300 baud "speedy" ones. Otherwise, you were stuck on the 110 baud version.

From there move one to other mini computers and then PC's - Apple ][+, Commodore Pet, and then the IBM's. Now I work on embedded devices, and AWS-based Linux backends.

Learned Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, x86 assembler, etc. With a dozen or so more in mix.

Got to work mostly in the California Silicon Valley during that time - so awesome!  Not as crowded as it is now.

Worked on cool projects, like speech recognition, experiments for the space shuttles,wrote an RTOS for a company, and DSL compiler/vm-interpeter, automotive black-box testing, transmitting video and data over satellite using my own udp multicasting protocols. All kinds of hoopla.

They had this really cool computers and electronics technology "graveyard" store, where abandoned high tech/ projects went to die. Like the Area 51 of abandoned components. It was called the "Weirdstuff Warehouse", in Milpitas, CA.

It's still there, but I doubt if the inventory is still as eclectic as it was then. ;-)

Now, 35 years, 19 computer languages, and thousands of projects later, I'm still as interested in programming and electronics as the first day I encountered them, if not more so.

That's beauty of it - there's always something new to learn and create - the tech gets better and therefore the opportunities get better too.

Sometime I can't believe I get paid to have this much fun!

For me it started with Tomorrow's World and  The BBC Micro - watching these shows and wishing I had a computer. Then I got a ZX81 and later a Commodore VIC20 and learned BASIC. I still work as a programmer but these days it feels very far removed from the hardware. I started messing around with Arduino a couple of years ago and learned some AVR assembly. Feels a lot more like the early days, reminding me why I got interested in computers in the first place.

I started out with software. BASIC on Commodore PET. It mostly stayed that way, with a little dabbling in electronics, until pretty recently. Degree in computer science. IoT, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi have really pushed me into the hardware side of things. Writing, however, is not a strong suit.

At the tender age of 4, early 1970's, in some village in western Europe, my father brought home a broken piece of furniture. I sat around him as he tinkered behind the unit, enthralled at the complex circuitry, wondering what this thing did or if he could ever got it to work. Of course he would make it work, he always made anything work, from cars to toasters, but this was something I'd never seen before - a piece of furniture with weird parts inside.

It didn't take long before we had a working black and white TV set. I had never seen one before. No one in our small town had a TV set. The entire block would come over to our home to watch TV. It was amazing. We were poor, but through my father's ingenuity a discarded item became a treasure trove of entertainment.

A few years later, I happened upon a broken transistor radio, shattered and discarded in the street, but relatively whole. I brought it home to my father and he made it work. I was the only kid in the entire neighborhood with a working transistor radio. I listened to that thing for hours, wondering how it all worked.

We emigrated to the United States in the mid 1970's and the move was eye opening for me. Everything in the US was so large! Huge vehicles, large open roads, huge buildings, this huge magical place called a shopping mall, and or course the jaw dropping beauty of an entire store filled with toys (Toy's R Us). And next to the toy store was my favorite of all, a Radio Shack.

I could spend hours in a Radio Shack without getting bored. My first Christmas toy was the basic Tandy electronics kit. I built every circuit in that kit, twice. I asked for books with electronic and science experiments instead of toys. My mind was blown when I built my first crystal radio and actually heard AM stations! To this day, I still remember how shocked I was that this could be possible - to hear something in that small earpiece with absolutely no power source connected.

My father was an engineer and my mother an accountant, so I excelled in science and math. There was never any doubt I would pursue something in the STEM field. At the age of 13, I stood in front of a Commodore Pet computer at a local Sears store typing gibberish onto the screen. One of the sales guys showed me how to write a small program (10 PRINT "HELLO"      20 GOTO 10    RUN). I stood there, at that terminal, until the store closed, writing endless variations of the same basic code. I begged my parents to go to Sears every day so I could play with that computer. I learned a few more BASIC commands and would spend hours standing there writing code, oblivious to my surroundings.

After about a month, the Commodore Pet computer went away and they replaced it with a Vic 20 with a color TV screen. Mind blown. I begged my entire family to pool all my present and future birthday and Christmas presents for the next ten years into buying the Vic 20.

Christmas 1992 was the greatest moment of my life! I tore open my one special gift and spent two entire days hacking away. I did not stop to eat, play with friends, go to the bathroom, bathe, sleep, etc. Just sat there going through the entire manual, learning all the commands and applying them to my program when necessary. Once my program was finished (and I was completely delirious from exhaustion), it dawned upon me that there was no way to save the code. I had no printer or external drive! The Vic 20 also has a problem overheating, which was clearly evident when my left hand touched the chassis. It was not going to last very long being kept powered up.

In a panic, I begged my grandparents to buy a tape backup device. It was on sale for $199.95. They obliged, having witnessed first hand my intense dedication to learning about computers. The Vic 20 had been on for almost 4 days straight to that point, the outer shell too hot to touch. When we arrived home from the store and I plugged in the tape drive, the computer blew a fuse and turned off. My first ever program was gone forever.

That was many years and many programs ago. I went on to study computer science for my A.A. degree. Electrical and computer engineering for my B.S. degree, and Computer engineering for my Master's degree.

My proudest moment as an adult was taking an old broken transistor radio and completely repairing it, knowing what every component was, why they were on the board, how signals are modulated and propagated, demodulated, selected, and amplified. It connected me to my father, more than 40 years ago, sitting by the kitchen table fixing that broken radio I found on the street. It meant more to me than programming state machines on an FPGA or building my first robot using a PIC microcontroller programmed in assembly language. It was the realization of a childhood dream, converting magic into understanding.

I found a bunch of broken toys hidden under my son's bed a few days ago. He is mischievous, but honest when his misdeeds are discovered. Apparently he likes to take toys apart to see how they work. He only opens toys with electrical or mechanical components. Then he tries to "fix" them. The toys he can't fix are hidden away, under the bed, until he can learn more and try fixing them again. He is good at math and science too.

I tried to reprimand him, but I couldn't - I was too proud of him.

It started when I was 10 yrs. old and asked for a game machine for my birthday. On the day, I was given a Timex Sinclair/Sinclair Spectrum (the kit, not the complete one). After a lot of help, I got it built and learned a few things along the way. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the experience. So, I figured I earned the game machine and asked again for Christmas. On Christmas morning, I got a book on programming games in Basic. Needless to say, I was dissappointed, but interested in the book. It contained some versions of popular games, the means to create the programs and explanations of what was going on. I spent a lot of time on the book in the games  and found a love for programming and what I could create. Over the following years, new PC technologies were made available to my Father for testing. When he finished testing them, they were passed down to me. I applied what I had learned and used the PC's for various things (including homework, heavy sigh...). As I got older, I became fairly proficient in programming, troubleshooting and a massive gadget freak.

As time went on, I decided to make a career in IT and studied it formally. While studying, Programming became a great love of mine, and much to my wife's dismay, I spent a large amount of time at it. Sadly though, the necessity of work (Bills, Bills, Bills...) led me to get a job in in the administration side of IT where I lost touch with programming and project work and became a slave to the man, where redundant tasks and awkward users slowly drummed the life out of me.

This my friends is the day my story truly began. The day I was turned on to the Raspberry Pi. Since being intorduced to the Raspberry Pi, I have been exploring programming again. A project building a Web Server  has inspired me to start Web Design as a side line to my day job, bringing creativity back into my life. Dealving into home automation projects has steered me down new avenues and learning new skills. I am even learning the basics of setting up and maintaining a cluster, using multiple Raspberry Pi's.

To make a long story short, the Raspberry Pi has inspired me to explore new things, revivied my love of programming and dragged me out of the duldrums of life. To give back for the gift I have been given, I am creating a website for a friend's new project and applying home automation to my own house (that can be controlled from a mobile phone...), so my wife can enter a warm house when she comes back from a long day.

I suppose you can say that twice I was given something that both inspired me and pushed me in certain directions in my life. Hopefully I can do the same for my Son one day (as soon as he gets his head out of the PlayStation and leaves his room... Maybe I should wire the Home Automation to the power to his room and cut it off from time-to-time...).

Hi friends, I'm really enjoying reading everyone's comments.

As many of you forty-year-olds or more… I was lucky enough to live in the 70’s and the 80’s where any piece of electronic equipment was a treasure.

As a child I always dreamed of robots so my poor toys suffered being dismantled at first occasion. Then came the 8-bit home computers but that was another history that led me to discover what my vocation would be for the rest of my life and to take a degree in electronics and then in computers.

But, I want to share with you a little anecdote from my childhood. As I said, my dream was to have a robot, so I remember collecting pieces of electronics trying to build something similar to a robot; the problem was not having any theory in electronics without even knowing what a resistor was.

So I asked for help to a teacher in order to have some notions of electronics. When the day of his class finally arrived, with great enthusiasm and anxiety on my part, the teacher's first words were:

“Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the two points. Introducing the constant of proportionality, the resistance, one arrives at the usual mathematical equation that describes this relationship

I = V /R “

Imagine my face of misunderstanding and disappointment .... I was waiting for some experiments with lights, valves and x-rays ...

I was about 10 when my parents bought me a electronics kit , it was awesome and from that day i never looked back. I took apart everything that plugged in and learnt how to solder and put them back together . In the 80s i had a few early computers amstrad vic 20 and microbeee just to name a few top computers in their day and very easy to interface to the real world .

From then on i learnt a lot about control systems and went on to do a lot op computer and PLC controll and programing . I am currently smitten with arduino and looking forward to become aquainted with raspberry pie.