My path to IT as a career was set in motion by supportive parents that bought us Vic 20's and C-64's in middle school. A C-64 with a parallel printer attached via Grappler carried me through HS paper and SAT prep needs.
The bratty kid next door had II's and IIe's that we played with, and my lil brother had a TI-99/4a along the way as well.
Once in college someone gave me an original IBM PC, Model 5150 with full height floppies that I pimped out with a Hercules graphics card and NEC v20 CPU . Had fun connecting to the schools modem pool over the ROLM phones serial interface and ftp'ing and gophering to nowhere special. I then started assembling clones, an XT class, then 286 and 386sx's, etc etc.
Oh right, My first actual Mac was a PowerMac 8100 that my then employer plunked down on my desk and said learn it, you'll be supporting it next week. Good times, helping the helpless allocate memory to the Print Monitor so they could print complex documents, disabling extensions with the shift key, copying the system folder around to tshoot issues. Yeah it was kinda crappy, but Win 3.1 was a mess back then too.
So fast forward over a decade of assembling more PC's for that video capture and edit project that never happens and I decided I was tired of noisy hot running desktops, sold them all and got a white plastic MB C2D, an Al Unibody MBP.
Thing is you can't quit the assembling hobby with led to todays hackintosh.