I was interested in programming, don't really know why but the thought fascinated me to be able to instruct a computer to do things you want it to do. So I had tinkered with QBasic and Pascal. A friend of mine went the C/C++ route which lead to us arguing like cat-and-dog (surely out of boredom) about the various benefits.

Then we mutually tried out linux and editors. He picked Emacs, so I went with vim. Haven't regretted it ever since.