How you got into electronics, tell your story.

[Refrigerator]

Hey.
Just wanted a thread where people could talk about how they got into electronics ! 
I remember myself always trying to take things apart to see how they work, sadly my mom always threw them away before i had the chance to put them back together .
Anyways i was about 5 years old when i built my first circuit, it was a small woofer a motor and a battery all hooked up in series, when i connected the battery it started making this sound and if i touched the shaft of the motor the sound would change. At the time i thought it was the greatest invention in the world and from that point on i was fascinated by electricity and what it does. Unfortunately at the time getting parts for me was a struggle but i once found a piece of some radio on the street and it had these super rare/expensive things ( aka. potentiometers  ). That was when i made my first project, it was a 12V bulb, 9V battery and that piece of the radio PCB with the pots, i managed to hook them up just the right way around to make a dimming light, it was all enclosed in a cardboard box ( of course  ) the broken off pcb also had a 3,5 mm jack on it, i thought that if i plugged in headphones in it it would play radio. I once even took it to the kindergarten where all the people were " stunned " by my amazing work .   From that point on i kept disassembling stuff, taking pieces out ( bending them until they broke loose ), putting them into my little TETRIS "console", fooling around until i got to where i'm now. Building projects, repairing stuff, saving up money for an oscilloscope and various other things.

How about you guys ?

[marshallh]

I'd gotten one of those book + small components with bullet plugs type kits at 5, couldn't really understand the concepts (I have always been slower to pick up on the abstract) Had my sister explain it to me, which confused me mroe. Watched my dad build a FM bug kit by soldering and it was like crack to me.
At 6 worked with my dad to modify my r/c car to operate off 6 C cells instead of AAs. Got another springboard electronics kit.

Used some various pics and what not, but didn't make a PCB til I was 17.
Even in just the last few years getting a custom pcb made is vastly more affordable for the individual. I don't think there is a single better time to be in electronics right now. I can shoot off a dense 4l pcb for $50, stuff it with BGAs and reflow it like a pro all in under a month.
What a time to be alive.
Now, many people are going to be older than me and say it was better in the 80s.... 

[Artlav]

The first time it was like this.
Once upon a time when i was around 4, my father bought me a pyrography toy (burn-drawing on wood).
I quickly got curious how it works - it's just a piece of metal on a tip of a pen!
And it gets hot somehow!

So i took it apart (somehow i knew already how to use a screwdriver), unwound some wires, spread it across the floor, stared at a big chunk of metal at the heart of it (that was likely a transformer of some sort) for a bit.
Unable to figure it out, i decided to plug it into the socket as is and see what happens.

BANG!
Lights flicker, sparks and smoke, the plug won't go back out, parents running back into the room.
That was the first time.

From here down it was both more and less destructive - the itch to take things apart stayed, but there were much less bangs.
It helped that my father ran a solar cell fab, and would occasionally take me to work with him (and back with a toy or two).

Eventually i learned to put stuff back together, but that's a whole other story.