OK, here is my story.
My Dad taught me to fix everything when I was a kid. Plumbing, carpentry, electronics and electrical, auto mechanics...I loved fixing and building. The earliest project that I remember was an airplane dashboard made out of wood and it was festooned with switches, buzzers and lights. My Dad designed it and we built it together.
Fast forward to 1977 when I got hired as a tech by DEC. We chip-chased back then with a scope. Addresses and vectors were set by soldering or removing jumpers. Then came the DIP switch which morphed into plug and play. Back then hardware was where it was at but the move to software started. Since I liked using my hands I stayed the hardware route when all signs pointed to a future, and money, in software.
I had it great until the early 90's. Phat pay check (salary with OT), company car, field service job working out of my house, no dress code. Well, there was a code (tie and jacket) but I wore jeans and a T shirt. I got written up a lot for that. Back then, they wanted us blue collar techs to blend in with the white collars we interfaced with. That is exactly why early tool bags looked like an attache case.
Those really were the good, old days! 10-15% raises at least twice a year. Full medical, dental and vision care for the family. Lots of time off. No drug testing back then. Liquid lunches.
Then the **** hit the proverbial fan. The PC killed the mainframe. DEC went from 140,000 to about 30,000 employees when they down sized me. Then came two more crappy, low paying jobs and two more down sizings. What else could an unemployed, middle aged mainframe guy do but start my own PC repair biz? Unlike you guys, I never touched a PC until I built my first one when I started my home-based computer repair biz in 2007. That's right, 30 years after my first computer repair job!
Here is the first computer I ever worked on. A PDP 11/34 with 1/2" tape drives, 8.5" floppies, 2.5 MB removable hard drive, 1" paper tape drive and a 16 bit processor with around 16-128K core memory.