What did you want to be when you grew up?

[Suture]

Originally posted by: raildogg
Explain in details how you are in the IT field without going to college. I am currently debating what major I should get and would like to go to college this fall. Did you educate yourself that much harder than everyone else to make it?

Remember when the NES was released? All the kids on my block got one. I got a freaking computer. An Atari 65XE with 64K memory and a tape drive. I was pissed. Adding further insult to injury, games were hard to come by on the Atari 65XE. I immediately took it apart and realized I was fascinated with it. So I learned to program, bought a disk drive, etc. Then picked up a Commodore 64, a Kaypro II, an Atari ST, etc. When my parents agreed to let me get a modem, that's where I'd say the fun really began. I started going to some Atari user groups in the Tidewater (VA) area and was the youngest person by far to attend. I met a lot of nice guys who gave me a hand in learning other programming languages on other platforms.

Then realized a few years later I hated programming, lol. Got into BBSing with a Hayes 300 baud modem, which got me into trouble, but I learned a lot. I eventually started contributing to a few rags like Blacklisted 411 and Phreak, etc., and met some really smart people. A few years later, some BBSes started offering Telnet access, then SLIP accounts, etc. and I got in early and good with the owners. Some of these BBSes were huge, hundreds of lines, and eventually went on to form their own ISPs. I was able to learn networking/IPing through this. It was cutting edge at 2400bps.

Basically, I missed out on a lot of Nintendo. I wasn't an indoor child at all, but while everyone else was playing Nintendo, Genesis, etc. I was using Lotus Magellan to read hexadecimal code so I could crack stuff and figure out how things worked.

Getting my foot in the door was the hardest. It's true what they say, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Nobody wanted me because I didn't have an education beyond high school. I got my first start (as a network administrator) because my step-brother basically put his reputation on the line for me at NCR Corporation. From there I just went to Verizon to work in their NOC and help get their ADSL program off the ground. Now I work with biometric security, NIST-stuff for defense contracts, Federal organizations, etc.

I didn't mean to drag this out into my life story, so I'll cut it here. Plus I have to pee.