Ok, I'm 28 and started out with computers at age 12. First computer was a Amstrad 1512 by Schneider. It was a 8086 box with 512k and 2(!) 5 1/4" floppy drives, and a 4 color CGA monitor. One year later, I got a hardcard (controller and harddisk on one board) of 20MB. Apart from getting to know the GEM (very early windows-like thing) layer on the DOS operating system and programming some GWBasic, I mainly used the Amstrad for games.
Second box was a Mitac 80286, 1MB ram and 20MB HD, EGA video card. This one was the last 'brand' pc I got. From then on I owned a 80486 clone, a Pentium 133 and now a AMD Athlon 500.
I used the 486 for my mechanical engineering studies doing the type of calculations that took all night. After that the Pentium 133 mainly helped me with programming projects.
For the moment I work as a programmer for a Belgian company that sells measurement soft- and hardware. I'm gaining some experience in C++ and NT platform programming.
I know absolutely nothing about networking, but I thought this would be a nice place to learn. It's not my goal to become a network guru or so, but it is my goal to protect my home connection as best as possible (maybe you need to be a guru to do so :-) ).