My parents messed up and bought me a Radio Shack 150-in-1 kit back in 5th grade (1979). Played with that for a couple of years, along with tearing other stuff apart to make other stuff not in the book...of course along the way, I didn't know that I didn't know what I was doing.
Before that I was always drawing stuff out on paper...go-karts, airplanes, trying to build soap-box-derby cars. No money at the time, too young to care about the future, etc.
Summer of '81, relatives bought me a Tandy MC-10 (6803 CPU if I remember right). Learned how to program that, tried to run other stuff off the cassette port motor relay (not knowing that I could burned out the board on the MC-10).
Got to 7th grade and discovered the Apple II, II+, IIe series of computers. Learned how to program them... walked around school with these huge ARRL books under my arm trying to learn electronics...but again, no money to buy stuff and play around. Then I discovered the Tandy Color Computer II. Learned to program that in Basic as well as assembly (anyone remember EDTASM+?). Tried to build an extender card to run some of the signals out of it so I could play around. Burned up that system board. Got another CoCo2, max'd it out on options (including the whole DS9 (?) operating system,etc.) and decided since I burned up the previous board, I'd concentrate on programming. Stayed with both Apple and CoCo basic and assembly until I graduated high school. Joined the military, got trained in aircraft avionics, although I didn't learn anything in tech school because I had already read all about it in books during the previous 6 or so years.
Got stuck in a rut of drawing stuff on paper, wishing, dreaming, etc, until '98. I finally had 'spending money' and I finally bought my first 'real' PC (Windows 98/98SE/ME, etc, Celeron 300->450, etc. with all of the goodies at the time, 2x Voodoo2 cards SLI'd, huge 40GB drives, 20x CD, etc).
And about 3 months after spending that $3000 on the latest and greatest PC stuff, I bought a Warp13a programmer, a few PICs, PicBasicPro, some breadboarding supplies, generic pieces/parts, etc. and started on my MP3 player project. I jumped right in, bought all of the parts to build the player with the intent on building a player and only a player. I didn't do the blinky light thing specifically...well, I did, but it was more of a consequence of not being able to get anything to work and figuring out that I had to start slow and work my way up.
Which is exactly what I tell the nubs' that show up here wondering why their latest combination toaster/oven/converter/spacecraft/player/television doesn't want to work and they've only been into PICs and PBP (or electronics) for the last 15 minutes.
Start off slow, blink a light, show your name on an LCD, push a button, a light comes on, read an A/D converter connected to a pot, etc.etc. Jumping in wastes money (about $700 in my case!).
That's my sad sad story...
Oh, and I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have a single piece of paper in a nice frame on my wall... College-shmollege, what a waste of money... (and I'm sure there's a lot of people in this hobby and on this forum that don't have a degree from the University of Anywhere...rock on!)
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