Same. My brother brought home an illegal copy of visual studio and I was hooked pretty much immediately. We had no internet at the time so I found myself using the MSDN knowledge base articles for potential explanations.

It really annoyed me that I couldn't get nice bitmaps in menus so I eventually learned about Ownerdraw. That changed my life. Having to hook into the wndproc and all the other windows api calls introduced me to C, and so I naturally started experimenting with C++. All without internet, stackoverflow or groups.

I'm now write C++ for a living.