Student by day, nerd by night! Well, nerd most of the time... In 1996(ish) my Dad bought our first "family" computer. I say "family" because I used it more than everyone else combined. I ran up HUGE phone bills connecting long distance for an additional 1kb/sec dial-up connection and played SimCity and Need For Speed more than the creators probably intended.
Around the age of 12 (1997-98), I became interested in application development and went on to pursue HTML and JavaScript. I spent hours trying to get JavaScript to function as a server-side scripting language, which never worked because JavaScript isn't really a server-side scripting language and I didn't have a server (details...details...). Anyway, for Christmas in 1998, all I wanted was my own computer (my sisters were starting to play Zoombinis a lot). So I asked for money and bought a Dell Dimmension XPS 350.
Pentium 2. 96MB of Ram. 8GB of hard drive. V.90 modem. Hardware DVD decoding. Windows 98. SUPER HOT!! I learned ASP, Visual Basic for Applications, dabbled in C/C++ and Java, and late in my Windows career, I mastered JavaScript (for client-side scripting), PHP (server-side scripting) and MySQL.
Anyway, that lasted a while until I found Linux in early 2001. I played with it for a while and around 2005, I switched from Windows completely. I occasionally had to move my Linux partition over so I could install Windows and do some school work that required Windows (yea, it sucked). Now I just use a virtual machine and occosionally play SimCity 4 just for fun (it works with Wine too). My system is faster (3GHz Pentium 4), has more memory (1.5GB and 500GB hard drive) and I think I use software decoding for playing DVDs. You cannot really tell the difference between hardware and software decoding anymore because processors are so fast.