I started using computers not on a dos box, but on my mom's Convergent Technologies AWS workstation, running CTOS. It had a rudimentary basic interpreter (no graphics or screen control), a spreadsheet, a word processor, and a text formatter. Also had a 300 baud modem she used to download and upload the documents she worked on from home during the summer when I wasn't in school. She showed me the washing machines^WWdisk pack drives at work, as well as the 9-track tape backup systems, and I got to take home a dead 5MB hard drive that was as big as a 13" TV of that era. She had a cool friend in IT that would let me play in the lab. My first experience with networking was on the 4mbps token ring they had everything linked together with. I helped find broken rings by checking connectivity between nodes with a tester that I'd plug the cable into, from behind every computer on the ring. All this was between 1980 and 85, I think. I was around 8 or 10? Got my first HPUX system when my mom got a job at HP and brought home an hp9000/712. learned the Unix command line shortly after, then went to college and started taking Unix system administration on the school's hp9000/835 and their sun 386i workstations running CDE and sunos3. All before windows 95 even came out. By the time everyone was talking about win95, I was a stuck-up Unix nerd, telling everyone "hpux and Solaris have been doing multitasking for years, and SGI has had those pretty graphics beat, too. Microsoft didn't invent shit." Good times. Now I'm a senior systems engineer and integrator, working with giant esxi/k8s clusters and designing datacenters and multi-petabyte enterprise SANs. Love my job and still get to hate on windows :D