Hm. Seems all the comments to date are from twenty-somethings. Well, let's see what a few more years adds to the conversation, if anything.

I've been working on computers for around twenty five years now. My first experience was with a teletype connection to a local (at the time) community college. I used it to play TREK and other games; I also used to to poke at the various libraries on programming and so forth. I never had a lot of time on it, but something stuck. I was 14 and the big argument of the day was whether or not it was wise to let TI-30 calculators into Math classes.

A few years later, the high school I attended purchased a TRS-80 Model 1, complete with the newly shipping cassette drive for off-line storage. I quickly devoured the BASIC manuals and started poking at its version of ASM programming. The next year, they bought three Model III's. The Math teacher, placed in charge of the nascent computer lab, would frequently rail at a friend and me regarding the huge amount of time we were "wasting" to write programs to play games, to do simple little graphics, ala the "Star Wars" titles (this was 1980; "Empire" was imminent), and writing D&D helper programs (Character Generators, Dungen Generators, Dice Rollers, and so on). He felt computers should be used for real work. We ignored him and continued to poke at them as best as we could.

After graduating (and a few adventures I won't detail now), I managed to land a very entry level database programming/PC Support job at a Federal Agency. It was here that I learned the wonders of being online. I parleyed an account at the local university, taught myself just enough Unix to use FTP and discovered wonderful treasures like the now-defunct SIMTEL20 archives and USENET. I would scan the archives like crazy, downloading free compilers, tutorials, sample code, and so forth (including copies of the infamous Phrack papers that I carefully hid from management). Spent way too many hours digging through what I found and reading what I could learn.

After graduating college, I (eventually) took a job with a commerical software company (detailed previously) and found myself a sysop of their CompuServe forum. In the year that followed, I learned more about the product I was working on and database programming than I had in the previous five years working for the TLA agency. Not only were the questions far more twisted than I could have invented myself, the experiences were far more varied than I could have imagined.

Throughout this time, I frequented BBS's, a few different newsgroups, FidoNET, and a few other communities.

I kept the CIS account after moving out of tech, primarily because I didn't want to lose track of the friends I'd made online; I also kept it after leaving that company, because it'd become my primary online interface. (I actually still have that account because every so often, some sends an email to it.)

Of course, these days, we all use the Web for such things. However, some things remain the same; specifically, there are communities that are worth investing time in. The Monastery is one and the current incarnation of that older support community is another. (I won't detail it because it's not really important.) When you are lucky enough to find people willing to freely share their experiences to teach and to help you avoid their mistakes, use that and learn from it (respectfully, of course).

The whole idea of Open Source, public domain software, and similar ideas, is that information should be free. When you find a trove of such information, savor it and contribute back. Doing so continues the success of the movement, introduces new people to its inherent fairness, and (as you point out) trains the next generation of leaders.

Today's 14 years olds are tomorrow's twentysomethings. By then, you Gen-X'ers will be running your own departments and leading your own teams. If you learn from the experiences you run into and the ones shared with you on your journey, you can avoid the mistakes that lead today's 40-year olds to throw temper tantrums.

By then, of course, I'll be pottering around some home, nursing acute carpal tunnel, sweetly reminiscing about the secrets one could learn through a 300-baud modem, and fondly recalling text adventures played on green screens with 7x9 pixel characters.

--f