I grew up on video games. My first system was an Atari 2600, then a NES, then an SNES. I also had a 386 DX 16 with PC Geos on it. Wolfenstein 3d on a PC without a sound-card was the first PC game I ever played. I didn't find it very entertaining, the SNES, I thought, was superior.
I had recently made friends with some kids down the street. There were 6 of them living in one house, most of them older than me, but the younger ones about the same age. Anyway, they were also gamers, but they were PC gamers. They hada 486 DX2 66mhz with 4mb ram and a sound card. They showed me a game called Doom. HOLY SHIT I was blown away. Doom was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I had ever played, I begged my mom to buy me a PC.
This was all before the Internet "happened". My first PC was a Pentium 75 with 5 gigs of ram, soundblaster, and 1gb hard drive. Around the time Windows 95 came out I signed up with a local dial-up ISP. I discovered the the World Wide Web. There was a cli app that would let you change the graphics and sound data in Doom's WAD files. I had recently bought a computer scanner, and I spent about a month taking pictures of my family, working on bloody death animations, and calling them into my room to voice various sounds that I would edit and use in my version of the game, "Family Doom".
I guess that was my first go at "hacking." Later I got a job at that same ISP that I had origially signed up with. There I learned the basics of TCP/IP networking, Linux, and the Internet. It was amazing having access to a T1 back in the days before broadband. I guess I wasn't a hacker, but I had a solid "script kiddie" status.I was also earning a little bit of money, being 15 and not having any bills, I used the money to start building my own rig from parts. Overclocking became a hobby of mine, I got my A+ certification a couple years later.
I didn't start coding until my late teen/early 20s. I had tons of experience editing config files, or working on the command line, but I hadn't a clue about programming. I knew Doom and Quake were written in a language called C, so I downloaded Visual Studio Express 2003 and looked up the tutorials on cprogramming.com . After going through those tutorials I decided to enroll in my local college under the Computer Science program.
The most surprising non-academic thing I learned was that most of my professors were clueless when it came to computer literacy. They could write C or Java code in their sleep, but they were oblivious to basic computing. One professor couldn't even navigate a FAT/NTFS filesytem, a C drive? What's that? That's when I knew that the kind of education I had was different. I'm not some book-learned CS grad, although I do appreciate academics, I was and am a hacker first.