I got a Commodore 64 in '82 when I was eight, with disk drive and dot matrix printer. By the time I was 12 I was going to garage sales with my mom (an antique dealer), buying old broken C64s and other machines of the era (by high school I'd already owned several Spectrums, an Apple Lisa, many TRS-80s, a Coleco Adam, a Commodore Plus 4, and other assorted weirdness), and fixing them for resale (fixing computers back then meant soldering iron and a meter and lots of trial and error). So, my first business sprang from my experience with my first computer.

I also ran a BBS on my C64 through middle school and early high school. So, it gave me experience with computer networks, too. ;-)

I also loved Soul of a New Machine. Fantastic story, and reading it back in 97 or 98 lead me to research and buy Data General stock, which turned out well when they were acquired by EMC.