Filed under "Thank you Mr. Obvious":

First of you probably should read this article by Joel on why it's a good idea to have someone onboard with high level of experience in your language of choice and that programming isn't about all about the language as much as it is about the API.

Done?  Good, now let's continue.  Learning an operating system (Windows 3.1 in particular) was the greatest investment in my future I ever made.  The summer when I was about 17 I was working on my parents farm and I was begging and pleading for them to buy me a computer.  Now you may be under the mistaken impression that me working for them meant that they paid me a regular wage.  This is not exactly how it works in the agriculture business.  When you are born on the farm you are not so much a child as a source of cheap labor.  So I worked and they let me live there and eat.  Now it's not so bleary I had a pretty good child hood and I had a car in high school and college and I ate a LOT of food so I think things worked out.  Back to the story, I was begging and pleading for a computer and finally they gave in.  I ordered up a not so top of the line 386 40Mz from a defunct company called EPS which was made up of former Gateway employees.  It arrived fully equipped with a 15" monitor and Windows 3.1 with MS DOS 5.X.  I thought I died and went to heaven.  Now let's go back to my motivation for getting this rig.  I had a friend who's folks had purchased an IBM PC not long before this and he could play games on his computer and dial up the state teacher's BBS and also call his neighbors with the modem and annoy them with the squeals and wining of the modem. 

So there was my motivation, gaming on the PC.  I had a NES but it was starting to show it's age and all those games were kiddy games.  With the purchase of the PC I was now on to my next series of purchases, computer games.  I don't remember which I purchased first, Dune or Civilization but they were both incredible games.  Dune had an awesome soundtrack (I downloaded it last year and still think it's one of the best I've ever heard).  Civilization was a fantastic game and I've played every one of them since and I have Civ IV on my PC right now.  I then purchased Dune II which was the first real RTS and it was another amazing game.  It defined a new genre of games that survived in the Command and Conquer games and the Starcraft and Warcraft series's. 

Now why all the gaming talk.  I had to learn how to manage windows memory in order to play different games.  See in those days we used something called DOS to launch most games because Windows was such a behemoth and didn't really do anything for you besides allow you to run solitaire and a nice GUI file manager.  DOS had a crazy array of memory management schemes and classifications.  There was conventional memory, upper memory, expanded memory, extended and the high memory area.  Much of the problem was that PC's came with more memory then the programs could use without a lot of hassle.  So you had to configure your PC to use the memory configuration required by EACH PROGRAM!!!  This was especially true if you were a gamer.  Each game had it's own requirements for memory management and you had to follow them to have any hope of running these small marvels.  And run them I had to do because I loved these games.  I would come home after basketball practice and play games all night while listening to The Doors, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on Audio Cassette.  (Oh really grandpa did you walk up hill to school both ways?  No but my Dad did and his old country school was just up the road...)  Anyway I became quite proficient with changing the memory settings and after a while realized that I could script the changes with .bat files.  I became familiar with autoexec.bat and config.sys and the various tools for reading memory size and checking what TSR programs were loaded because you wanted to eek out every spare kilobyte you could to keep things stable.  So once you understand batch files and memory management you have a pretty good foundation for the rest of Windows. 

I didn't do much programming in those days unless you consider playing with QBasic to be programming.  But the foundation of programming involves having a good understanding of the platform you are targeting.  If you are a Unix developer you should be a fairly good Unix administrator, and most of the Unix programmers I knew were pretty salty (meaning good) and could pass as system admins at most companies.  In my experience the better someone knows the OS they are using, for instance Windows XP, the better the chance that they are a decent programmer.  Do you think someone can become a good Windows programmer without being a good Windows hacker/admin?  I don't and my experience has shown this to be true. 

So for me my start was playing games.  This lead to playing with the OS and eventually a job in Tech Support (at a large company, face to face, running to each computer, no on the phone send this job to India crap) and eventually programming full time, then a MS in CS then teaching CS to the youth of Sioux Falls, SD.  Many of my CS students are also voracious game players, sometimes to the detriment of their school work (here comes the fuddy duddy ruining every bodies good time...) but the stuff they do with graphics, etc to hack games is kinda amazing.  No memory management standing in their way just getting a 3-D model to render correctly.  However the principle holds.  Gaming got them into computers, intelligence will keep them there and hopefully lead to rich payout in their gaming investment.