I was living in Riga, Latvia. At that time it was part of Soviet Union. "Perestroika" just started and we in general didn't have any computers at home.

Professors from the University of Latvia Data Center invited me and other high school students to introduce us to "Informatics".

We haven't got access to computers, but they explained us basics - variables, data types, arrays, control structures, loops, block diagrams.

At the same time we were learning at school linear algebra. The idea that you can solve а large scale equation very fast was very fascinated for me.

It started with a telephone.

Being an 80's child, at the time I must have been 7 or 8, it wasn't uncommon to see rotary phones especially at elderly houses. My grandpa had one for as long as I could remember, but I digress. I remember we visited a great uncle who was an engineer and a tinkerer of sorts. He would keep his old electronics and let us take them a part. So here I am, again 8 or 9, disassembling this old rotary phone in his barn all by my lonesome. I was fascinated. However, old electronics did house a secret. Potting gel. It was a lot less a gel and more an oil based adhesive that was quite a mess.

I think that experience, especially the potting gel, led me to disassemble more. Which as an inquisitive kid meant every toy I had with electronics. Most of which I was able to reassemble and still work. Though curiousity did kill the cat, or in this case a toy, from time to time. By the age 11ish I was relatively fluent on what boards looked like even if I didn't know what the components were. I remember I had this walkey talky that quit transmitting. When I took it a part and looking at it for an hour or so I noticed this one brown cylinder looked different than the rest. So that Saturday my dad took me to the TV repair shop. Absolutely heaven. I was taken back by all the disassembled electronics. So much so that I almost forgot why I was even there. I approached the old gentlemen working the repair bench and showed him what I thought was the problem. He taught me that it was a resistor and that I was right, it had burned up. He replaced the resistor and happy he made a kid's day didn't charge us. He taught me a few more components and we were on our way.

Fast forward several years later and I found myself attending devry studying my EE. I was the guy all my non devry friends came to when their laptop power ports needed re soldered. Literally anything that plugged in or took batteries they'd bring to me to see if I could revive them.

Electronics has always had my fascination. Like many here I'm sure, I have a bench at home full of RPis and duinos. I'm a PLC engineer by day trade and microcontrollers have started to take over my desk. It's the one thing that never bores me even After all these years.

So be sure to hand down your old electronics to the kids. You just might be setting them up for the rest of their life(s)!

i have always been a bit of a tinkerer, my grandfater would provide old tech for me to take apart and put back together again. this kept me busy for hours, i moved on from small tech to computers, i learnt to repair and build systems, going on to a college course in Hardware support, and then a Honours degree. i love tinkering with my Raspberry Pi and am in the process of building a 2 player fight stick with sound and retropie, if this works out it will be a pi cabinet afterwards. Just go to practice my soldering !

A series of events led me to the military instead of college.  I was fortunate to have tested well and was eligible for any job available.  I chose infantry because it was exactly what my parents did not want me to do.  After a brief period of foolishness, I had an injury that looked like it might end my military service.  After some convincing I was allowed to transfer jobs to become a ground radio repairman, and later an electronics maintenance technician.  It's been over 16 years and while I've used my skills here and there for wiring up car audio or repairing everything from laptops to Xboxes, I never made anything.  The past four years I taught entry-level Marines basic electronic theory, troubleshooting, and soldering.  It was satisfying but you never stay around more than a few years before you get sent somewhere new.  My time came and we pushed off to the opposite coast.  New job, new responsibilities, but I'm not in the position to perform repairs.  Instead I supervise the technicians and perform quality control.  Missing the hands on work I started tinkering with Raspberry Pi.  It has been extremely rewarding and allows me to combine the woodworking skills from doing cabinetry and remodelling with my father.  So far I've made a bar top two player arcade console, several security cameras, two with integrated IR lighting, two handheld arcades one with a pi zero the other based on the pi 3, and this weekend I threw together a smart mirror.  For the next project I would like to experiment with both the pi and arduino with touch sensors.  I think this will be the opportunity for me to dive headfirst into code.  I've only completed the examples that came with an arduino starter kit and want to see how I can combine the two.  Perhaps a homemade CNC machine.

I'm looking forward to digging through posts on here to get some ideas.

Cheers,

Hans

What got me hooked was Popular Electronics magazine. I had a subscription from the time I was able to read. I desperately wanted to build the 6m transmitter and receiver and managed to get $20 for a birthday. I went straight to the Lafayette Electronics store with a copy of the magazine and told the clerk I wanted to buy all the parts in the parts list. I think I was about 9 years old. But my mom wouldn't let me spend the money on that so that project never went anywhere. Maybe that was the start of my habit of unfinished projects.

Like others I took stuff apart and (sometimes) got it back together. My dad used to build Heathkits and as soon as he got bored with one I'd take it apart. Sorry Dad.

When I was 12 I did make the Digital Logic Microlab, http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1970/Poptronics-1970-04.pdf

It's a 4 bit plugboard "computer" of sorts. What can you do with 4 bits? Well you can count (in binary) from 0 to 15. If you're clever you can count backwards. You can make pseudo random numbers. Hook up a speaker and you can make tones. One thing you can't do is win the science fair because none of the judges had a clue what it was. Today I volunteer as a judge in our county science fair to right how I was wronged.

Later my interest shifted to photography and I set up a darkroom to develop my own film. Any darkroom needs a good timer, so I set out to build one which doubled as my wood shop project in 9th grade. I built the case in shop class and the electronics at home. Three 7490 decade counter ICs, with BCD to 7 segment display decoder drivers, and incandescent filament 7 segment displays.  I hand drew a circuit board with a resist pen and etched it. I had trouble keeping the holes straight while drilling with a hand drill so I had to bend the leads of the ICs to make them fit. It looked horrible. But it worked and really impressed my shop teacher who in 1973 had never seen a numeric digital readout.

A year later I made a 5 function pocket calculator. I never found a way to make a decent case for it so it remained 2 circuit boards stacked on a breadboard with 2 9V batteries (bipolar power supply needed in those days.) I still have that and it still works. Here's some pictures:

Other projects included a digital clock with a very quiet alarm and 2 displays for my parents who slept in separate beds. A sound maker that had about 30 knobs and switches and could make all kinds of sounds. A stereo amplifier. An attempt (unfinished) at a programmable scientific calculator. And a 32 bit CPU unit made from an early bit slice chip set from Intel. (I never finished the microcode.)

Then college: DEC PDP-10 and PDP-11, Lisp Machine, Z80. An attempt at an "ebook" reader which flashed the words one at a time onto an 8 letter alphanumeric LED display.

First job at Hughes Aircraft Company. Did a lot there but my favorite was the descent control processor (1802) for the Galileo probe that went to Jupiter. I scratched my initials on the case so now my initials are on Jupiter. Taggers beat that. Well at least they went there before an entry estimated to end at 6000 Kelvin and 25 G impact which surely smashed them to smithereens.

Today most of my life is software and management. But I still enjoy tinkering.

Around age 10 my uncle built us our first computer, a clunky Pentium II running Windows 95. I'd always been a fan of video game consoles, but this was able to do so much more, it was incredible to me. I then spent every day from that point on the computer in the back half of the family living room, only surfacing to eat and to occasionally play with my brother and friends, or to play a video game on the TV. Two years later, I decided to save my birthday and Christmas money up to be able to upgrade the family computer, since I wasn't allowed one for myself. I spent more than the computer originally cost completely upgrading every part, manually installing each piece myself and learning how it all fit together. The sheer joy I felt when it was finished and the satisfaction with having saved the money and building it by myself was at that point I knew I wanted to work with computers, and I've never looked back since.

I started as a child and always took apart my toys to see how they worked.  This always fascinated me and still does. At about 10 years old I became very interested in electronics and began to build simple circuits. It was fun to experience accomplishment in successful builds of radios, power supply, tape recorders and stuff. I continued this interest and went to college where I received a B.S. Degree in Physics.. I continued further and receive a M.S. Degree in Engineering. I worked as an Electronics Engineer for 37 years for the United States Department of Defense, Army where I supported the repair and overhaul of complex radar systems. I am retired now but still love to tinker with computers and electronics. It's in my blood!

I was always interested in 'quipment from a young age so I'm told, I remember getting a big book called electricity and magnetism, I think by usborne,  and another on how TV programs are made. and this got me experimenting with bits of old torches switches and batteries.  I built robots using bulbs paper fasteners, wire, tinfoil and tape so that when it rolled the wire would couch tape then tinfoil on the wheels to make it's eyes flash.  I spent more time hacking about cardboard boxes after Christmas and Easter making robots and tanks, than is probably healthy.  This ended up with me getting electronics project kits and science kits which seemed so good and futuristic at the time.

One set of grand parents had a drawer full of old meccano, and also got me helping working on the car. (I now have his classic mini.) My other grandparents had a farm where there were lots of things including the excitingly named battery house which was full of bits of broken farm equipment in need of further disassembly. Imagine my disappointment when I later found that the battery house used to be for chickens! 

after using a BBC at school. I saved up for a ZX spectrum 48K+ and also got input magazine which was like a bible of information and got me into programming. I just had to have it though because it seemed so exciting, at the time you tended to get in trouble if you deviated even slightly from the teachers class in school.  I think more out of worry on their part as some of the teachers knew less than I did, and were worried about the equipment.

There were also loads of great tv shows. Tomorrows world, video and chips, whiz kids, knight rider, even Metal Mickey, that just made electronics and mechanics seem so good! 

I couldn't help it really. I had to be an engineer.  Since being a responsible grownup,(ahem) I've helped out at school and done demos of seeing electricity using a scope, and modifying a program to make messages change.  After one event as my sons school he came round with friends who hadn't seen my demo at a YR6 careers fair, and I ended up setting another demo for his friends.  To be fair, getting the school children to interact and discuss electronics has been one of the best experiences of the last few years.

Dan.

Growing up in the '80s.  Mechanical drawing were my love at that time.  There's nothing that I couldn't do with the mechanical drawing arm.  That is until I went to a Spring open house at Boston University and learned that they have CAD stations that could do things 1000x faster than I can do with my mechanical tools.   Then my freshman year, I discovered that those CAD stations are reserved for Seniors and Graduate students.  So I turned to Digitial Electronics since I wanted to learn the inside of the computer more so I can build my own.  From there, I learned that those transistors that makes up all the various digital gates are all originally from the analog world.  I met my professor in his analog electronics class and I learned that analog electronics design is not just a math based thing but it's also almost an Art form when it's done right.  Anyway, I camped out at my professor office and lab and got to know and learn from all his TAs until he gave me a research position.  From there, I learned to built special instruments that goes on science satellite (some by NASA and some by ESA).  But because I was the youngest, I had to do what no one else wanted to do.  Testing!!!  That meant I had to learn how to program C on a Mac and learned how to use a GRIB logger to test our circuitry response. 

Years later now, after having co-founded a local ISP and working on both hw (networking/linux) and sw side of things (web - from PERL to JavaScript/HTML to ASP/ASP.NET/PHP/just about everything in between).  I have now just started getting involved with a local High School Robotics team (competes in FIRST Robotics Challenge) as a Mentor now teaching both Electronics and Programming.  What a full circle I've came.

My love affair with electronics started with an issue of Boys Life.  The October 1986 issue had an article by William O'Connell entitled "Get on the Air".  I was enthralled by the idea of tuning in radio stations from halfway around the world.  I just had to have a radio.  So, that Christmas my annual list had a RadioShack DX-360 radio at the very top.  I think my parents got tired of hearing me talk about how much I wanted that radio.  I was not normally a talkative kid, but I wanted one and I let everyone know.  Luckily, that December I received one of those radios under the tree.  I spent many a night listening to Deutche Welle, RNW, and others.  I was hooked.  That shortwave radio turned me on to ham radio which turned me on to electronics in general and led to me apply to the Electrical Engineering program at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.  The rest is history.