In freshman year at college, 1992, I met a guy with a fancier computer than I had. The dude was awesome as a C coder and already had a job as one. He let me use it to play around with Persistence of Vision Raytracer which was an open source 3D scene generating language/platform. His computer was also what I used for accessing BBSes and IRC chat rooms for the first time. I was hooked from then on.