Back in 1983 (I was 12) we were living in Great Lakes, IL., and I used to go to the Navy Exchange and hack their Vic20 they had on sale there (I think it sold for about $150 then). Heh, I used to put it in an infinite loop saying something stupid like "TrickStar rocks the world!!" TrickStar was my very first nickname/handle, I wanted so bad for a Hutch TrickStar BMX bike so i used it for a handle. This is also the place that I meet my best friend Tyranus/T-Rex. Heh, we used to skip school, hang at my house and play computer games, among other things. 
     My Father bought one of those damn Vic20 computers. After we had it for about 3 months and I learned how to crack it to do cheasy stuff  (like hex edit some of the boot soft) we upgraded to the Commodore64. Now this was a hum-dinger (at the time), this thing had a 5.25" Disk drive, 64k of memory, damn, I was cooking then! It was an awesome game machine and pop used it for Word Processing (Easy Spell). About 3 months after we owned that, pop spent $150 for a 300 bps modem (a week later it sold for $50, talk about pissed). Thats when I heard the first screaching sound of an analog modem connecting to another. I was hooked. A true believer of The Hackers Manifesto. Its all history from there. 
     I stayed with the Commodore line of computers until 1993, from the C64 we went to the Amiga 500, after that I bought my own Amiga 2000. Commodore went to shit and I gave the A2000 back (sorry Larry), and was out of the scene for about 6-7 months. I still think greatly of the Amiga, its capabilities, ground breaking technology back then, and its trend setting architecture. 

     I guess it was sometime in 1994 that I got my first IBM-PC, a 386 sx25 SLC (always thought that meant "super low cost") with a whopping 4MB of RAM, and a 160MB harddrive. That poor damn computer, I run that sucker to its knees (it still lives today too)! I was calling the local boards here and gettin heavy in the BBS scene. Sometime shortly after I got the PC I adapted the nick/handle pSuB-XeR0. 
     I was the first one out of all my friends to experience the Internet. I found out that a company named Amaranth Communications was giving out free connects to the Internet (lynx at this time). I signed up with these people and downloaded some software they had available on their homepage, Trumpet Winsock. Heh, I wasn't suppose to have PPP connection but someone screwed up somewhere and I was in. Thats when I seen the Internet's World Wide Web in full color (using Mosaic 1.0 ewww, but it rocked at the time). Their software had a whole shitload of applications bundled with it, WSIRC, WSFTP, Archie, Veronica, Gopher, WinVN, and Telnet (plus a few others but my memory doesn't serve me well to say what else). Hmm, I had to check out this WSIRC, it was the only one that I really didn't have a clue about. I finally figured it out and I was online with this "free" account almost 24/7. 
     About a year later, Amaranth finally closed the account but, heh, they left the shell open, oops ;) . By that time I talked to a few other ISP's here and horn-swaggled them into giving me another dial-up. I was in the warez scene and all was good. I realized that I could still get email through amaranth and started checking their servers with my email login and password, WHOA hey, I could login to their POP server and store stuff. Man, I was one of the best warez dewdz around, I would get private access to sites and mirror all of it on Amaranth then turn around and dump it to a public FTP servers. People really liked pSuB-XeR0!!