I think we had extremely similar childhoods!<p>I too spent much of my free time tinkering with old Apple PCs - I started programming in QuickBASIC in the 5th grade because of it, and I owe my career today at a major tech startup to that.<p>I also empathize with the transition in high school - I always found history class to be a relative struggle due to the change from repetitive memorization to actual understanding&#x2F;notes.