As a kid, I was always curious about how things worked. However, I had no exposure to computers, I had only heard about them or seen them in the movies where they were housed in big rooms where guys with white coats worked on them and there were lots of blinking lights and spinning tape reels.
I learned electronics in the army (radios, still no computers) and went to work in the tech industry as a tech after that. I wound up working at IBM in their disk drive business but had no idea what a disk drive was really useful for, they were attached to mainframe computers and the disks spun around and the actuator arm moved back and forth.
At the age of 30, I was promoted into a management position at IBM and had a PC with 128K of RAM and 2 floppy drives on my desk that I didn't know how to use and didn't know what it was good for. I started playing with spreadsheets using Lotus 123 and soon became somewhat of a whiz at that, including writing macros. That piqued my interest so I took a C programming class at the local jr college. A year later I resigned my management position and was accepted into a rigorous programmer training course where we were force fed assembly language programming 8 hours/day for 6 months. 27 of us started the course but only 9 of us graduated. After graduation, I was given a job as a mainframe programmer and have worked as a programmer/software engineer for the past 27 years.