30 Days of Geek #13: How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here. Apologies for the lateness of today’s post, I was busy yesterday.

It was such a long time ago that I became a geek that I’ve sort of forgotten how it came to be.

Back when I was around 14 or so my stepfather bought me and my brother a computer, to stop us using his office computer to play games. As well as playing countless hours of Age of Empires and Grand Theft Auto, I spent quite a lot of time ‘making my computer better’, which really involved breaking it and having to reinstall Windows every few months.

Even before that though, I was messing around with a BASIC interpreter (QBASIC on MS-DOS) on the office computer… it must have been back in 1998-1999. I thought “Hello, world!” was a masterpiece. For a 9 or 10-year old, I guess it was. At that stage, anyway. I’ve met 13-year olds writing operating systems now. Kids these days.

It’s definitely personal interest, but I hope to make it into a career.

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