huh, gee, kinda hard to say. I grew up in a computer-oriented family. My dad has been a programmer (mostly in main frames) ever since I can remember. So I've been exposed to the dos days when dos was king and windows 3.1 and IBM OS/2 Warp and all that old shiat. However, I never got into the computers aspect. I was just a kid and didn't want to sit in front of some old boring computer unless it's to play games. And when things went wrong, I contentedly relied on my dad to fix it.
Then sophomore year in high school came along and I had computer classes! It was just some boring learning how to use various office applications so I started to tinker around a bit. I remember fondly my excitement in discovering before a friend of mine on how to show the "hidden files". Also, I had gotten engrossed in "finding" all kinds of files on the harddrive through the open file dialog from Word.
At first there didn't seem to be anything in the folders until I discovered the "All Files" item in the filter list box. I started deleting like mad - wondering what will happen. I felt really evil when I'd try to delete some files and windows would say "deleting these files may prevent windows from operating correctly" or "Access Denied - file is currently being used by windows". Nevertheless the computer started ****ing up, so I rebooted... it never came back up. My teacher was so puzzled when he said it seemed like somebody deleted a bunch of files. I pretended ignorance...
So at first the computer was just a curious little toy. My friend was a little more security-oriented and tried to show me late one night a port scanner he'd found (7th Sphere). I thought it pretty cool to see all those numbers flashing by, but didn't understand a bit of it and fell asleep while he was doing whatever exciting things he was doing.
By my senior year, I had learned a thing or two about the small closed network in my school's computer lab. It was getting very fascinating for me, and my friend's hacker talk interested me even more. I have an adventurous and curious type personality and love sneaking around doing things nobody can track. However, I had no idea on where to start, and programming was also getting very interesting...
It wasn't until my freshman year in college (2 years ago) that I actually started to get somewhere in hacking knowledge. During that year I had my taste and a few meals of hacking and found myself satisfied. I no longer want to progress much in the art of hacking, and am content with just reading and hearing about new techniques and such - without actually doing them. Instead, I devote my love to programming.
hehe, looks like I got a bit carried away there, but my fingers was itchy after 2 days of being stuck offline.