How did you get started? 
jacquesm: Running my own business:Necessity.I simply had to get some food on the table, it was a pretty good motivator I can tell you.Programming:Because it seemed like a better way to build logic stuff rather than to use a bunch of 74 series chips for it. I was always hooking stuff up to the centronics port or other io ports.My first 'programmable' device I think was a ti 57 calculator, then one of those radio shack/sharp pocket basic computers (I still have that thing somewhere here!), then a KIM-1.