I started programming when I was 16 back in 1974. Our headmaster was pretty progressive, our school didn't have a single computer, so we used the mainframe of a local university and the Fortran programs had to put onto punchcards to run.
I taught myself QBasic then later C, Visual Basic and some Assembler on my first computer a 8086 Amstrad 1640 - http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=19&st=1 I remember one of my first real programs was a printer driver for my old Epson dot matrix but I always liked writing logic games like Black Box.
Later, I sent a few of my programs off to a load of local companies and one of them took me on as a junior programmer. About three years later I was head programmer and training our graduate programmers. Around this time I taught our office printer with it's limited processing and memory to play Battleships, but my real job was creating and managing VLDBs (very large databases - databases usually over 1Tb in size). My work station could easily be another company's server.
Somewhere along the line I picked up ASP and PHP and went freelance for while writing websites while I was doing that I got a part time job in the auditorium at a community college where I learned real time broadcasting, and video and audio editing.
Probably one of the last generation to be able to do so without any higher education, I'm now more into multimedia project management and overseeing development of the company's websites.