You must have been retired already by the time Linus put his first line of code into the kernel ? ;-)

Well, my first system was ЭВМ ЕС-1033 (soviet clone of IBM S/360) back in 1988 and I was twelve. Me and a friend of mine we used to attend a local HAM radio club where we studied electronics, soldered radio receivers and other simple electonic devices (hoping to build an HF transmitter one day of course). For that we needed many electronic parts that were in great deficiency at that time. One summer of 88 we had been leaning around the city and decided to walk in to nearby multistorey building with "lots of air conditioners" stucking from its windows - the idea was to ask for used/discarded electronics which we can tear apart in search for required components (we looked for FET transistors mostly). We never walked into front door of such buildings, but rather sneaked into back doors instead. Once we got in, we immediately got caught by a woman in white robe who asked what we kids had been doing there. We told her that we are in seek of used electronics for our projects in the club. She got friendly, asked us about the club a little, then requested to follow her. Walking thoughout innumerous corridors, halls and elevators, finally she brought us into a huge room with walls made of glass, it was stuffed with different devices blinking lights of all kinds and it was full of people in white robes as well. She got us to a bearded guy telling our story. It appeared that guy was a chief of Computational Department (Вычислительный Центр) of the institution we intruded into. The guy also inquired about our amateur projects, then, before brining us to their storage of spare electronic parts, he led a brief tour around the machine room explaining things about terminals, CPUs, memory, tapes, disk drives and programs. In the end he told us to come back the other day, when he presumably would have more time to explain about computers, if we are interested. Of course I had been heard about computers before, we have had a couple of ATARIs in the club, also another friend of mine was soldering his own computer (Радио РК86), but that was the first time I saw a real machine. REAL! I was so much fascinated, so next day in the morning I was there again. I had been intruduced to a team of programmers, who mostly were very kind young women, and to some electronics guys. I remember I was asking lots of stupid questions and one gal handed me a heavy printout entitled FORTRAN, made on a peforated paper. Since than, electronics became my sencond point of interest. I became a very frequent visitor of the Department (I lived there I would say), two years later as I turned 16, I was officially employed as an operator, then as a programmer.

In 1991 the machine was dismantled and thrown away in favour of IBM PCs. So, I quickly learnt MS-DOS, Norton, etc, and began to programe in C/C++ (Borland C) and assembly. In 1992, I learnt what MODEM is, I spent lots of time surfing BBSed, and joined Fidonet, which made me abandon DOS in favour of OS/2. Using OS/2 I could run Fidonet node CM on my working PC (386DX2-66). In 1996, Internet came to town, so I learnt about networking and FreeBSD, which is my OS #1 till this day. I'm not fond of Linux at all, although I run Ubunut/Kodi on my home media center and I do a lot of programming for Linux based embedded.

I'm very much grateful to people at Computing Department for that they did not kick me back to streets in the beginning, for the time they spent on nursing me, patiently explaining very complex things an concepts, and of course for giving free access to the machine which I hung many many times erasing whole system from the disk. :-)