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In middle school, I would go to the grocery store, find candy bars on sale for 4/$1 or 5/$1 and buy a bunch of them, and then I'd haul around a backpack full of candy bars all through school, selling them for 50 cents. Pretty decent margins. I really just wanted money to be able to buy my own lunch, and this funded that need. This was my first foray into entrepreneurial business ventures. My Dad coached me on how to do it, and how to not eat the candy bars so as to lose my profits. Hard lesson for a chubby 13 year old to learn :)

Back in 1993, my dad got a 14.4k modem. Super cool. I don't remember how I learned about BBSs, but once I learned you could go to specific ones and download games, and you could put the games on 3.5" disks, I was hooked. I wanted to build a library of really awesome games. So I went onto every BBS I could find, and I queued up every game they had to download. I'd leave it running all night sometimes.

Some of my first memories with computers have to do with an old 286 motherboard, a 40mb hard drive, and installing windows 3.1 from 3.5" floppy disks. My Dad did some work for a guy, and if I remember right, the guy couldn't pay, so he gave my Dad some computer parts. Me and my Dad spent some time putting them together, and it was super interesting to me. I don't remember exactly what year, but it would've been around 1992 or so. We were living in a suburb of Chicago. I was around 8-10 years old. Good times.