By the time I was in high school, my parents bought an Apple ][e. The summer after my junior year, I wrote a program for my aunt. She was a speech pathologist who traveled to several schools and had to record time spent at each school and travel time so she could bill the schools. This was the first program I got paid for writing.
After high school, I had a summer job writing a program for a graduate student at the University of Nebraska. That was in Microsoft Basic on an IBM PC with a 40 Meg hard drive.
My freshman year of college at UNL, I happened to run into an alumni of my old high school. He was working at a blood drive for his fraternity (on Halloween, of course) and I had time to kill between classes so I decided to give blood. He asked what I was taking and I said computer science. Although the freshman intro class was in Pascal, I had worked out an independent study where, for one credit-hour, I took all the Pascal assignments and rewrote them in "C", which I had to learn on my own. It turned out that he was working for a professor who needed another programmer or two and suggested I drop by. I got the job and even had an office that I shared with another graduate student.
A few years later, that professor left the University and started MicroImages, Inc., taking us with him. I worked for MicroImages for 23 years. Eventually, though I needed a change. The economy was not doing too well and the market for GIS software was slim. When the company announced that we'd all have to take a 20% pay cut to keep the company afloat, I quickly wrote a resume and sent it to ITI (now Fiserv) and was offered a job. Ironically, I signed the paperwork accepting the job on October 31st, 2007 -- Halloween.
In the summer of 2006, I dislocated my elbow while fighting in the Cornhusker State Games. While recovering from that injury, I was unable to practice judo for two months, but still I took my youngest to a kid's class that met after judo on Saturday afternoons. There was a karate sparing class that looked interesting which met after the kid's class. One of the judoka was also taking sparing (she was dating, and eventually married the sensei) and had tried to talk me into it. I decided to stick around for the stretching excersizes and then go home. But after the stretching exercises, the Sensi told us to get the big foam pads and said we would be working on kicks. I thought "hell, I can do that without an elbow!" so I stayed and got the best workout I ever had. I was hooked.
I still don't go to the regular week-night karate classes, so I always miss testing. I wanted to try competing in karate in the next state games, so I asked other students to teach me the first kata. After two years, the sensei cornered me one Saturday afternoon and tested me, so I now have a stripe on my white belt (9th class). At this rate, I'll make black belt when I'm about 80. But I don't really care about rank.
In 2008, I competed in the Cornhusker State Games Karate tournament. Since I was the only competitor in the Senior Men's Novice division, I automatically got gold medals in both my divisions. I still got to fight two exhibition fights. The first was with an opponent of my choice. I picked a brown belt from another dojo. He beat me 3 points to 1. My second fight was against an 18-year old black-belt woman who was unopposed in her division. I guess she thought an old white-belt would be an easy fight. She beat me 3 points to 1. I got one other point that didn't count because only 2 of the corner judges saw it, but she acknowledged the hit. So even though I lost, I felt like I had challenged myself and didn't get totally slaughtered.