I started as a kid when my brother taught me how to program on a spectrum. At the time we were using an emulator, I was like 11 or something close. I also loved to open up every machine/gadget/toy I could get my hands on, try to understand how it works. For school projects I would create interactive games with electric circuits, like question/answer games with contacts on every question and answer, and a light that turns on when the answer is right. Simple stuff, but my teachers would be amazed.
At the first year of high school, I got to participate on a contest where we had to create an on-line radio station. After a week on the contest, me and my friend noticed a flaw on the system that would allow us to vote on our station unlimited times. We used and abused that functionality to put us in 1st place and each of us won a new desktop PC with a monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse, webcams, speakers and a mp3 player. Not to mention that thanks to us, our school won 5 new desktops.
Other relevant time was my first year at university, I was living with a friend and we had no Internet. I found that in my room I could reach an unprotected network and shared the connection with him, so for a week we were happy. Then, the owner decided to lock his router with WEP. At the time, I had no idea about wireless attacks, so I decided to investigate. I found that WEP was really insecure, downloaded some distro with the tools I needed (not backtrack, a spanish distro, wifiway I think) and about an hour later (troubleshooting, trying to understand what I was doing, etc...), I successfully retrieved the WEP password.
That experience was what made me want to pursue more knowledge, first on wireless attack vectors, then on network stuff (mitm, dns spoof, etc...) and so on.
