Technology of all sorts has interested me since I was a child. I often took things apart to ‘improve’ them. Most of the time the improvements were dubious at best. Undeterred I continued the quest to find out what makes things tick.
My real educational breakthrough came while I was in high school.
We had a teacher with enough foresight to realize that part of our mathematical education should include learning to solve problems using a computer. It was far from the graphical desktop experience we have today.
A large, clunky, noisy teletype terminal sat to one side in the room. Connecting this keyboard/ 
impact printer device to a remote very large computer was an acoustical coupled modem. This allowed us to take the ordinary telephone handset and firmly push it into two rubber surrounded cups for the mouth and earpiece. The connection speed allowed printing on the terminal up to about 5-10 characters per second.
This auspicious beginning launched me into a later career, starting with 4 years in the Marine Corps as technical support for aircraft navigational ground control systems.
Further professional background can be found here: LinkedIn
