I was only 6 years old when I wrote my very first program, with the help of my father I typed out a simple 2 line program that resulted in the message "hello Stan!" scrolling into infinity across the flickering green and black screen of our TRS-80 computer. I don't know exactly what it was about that moment but I was hooked, while other children where learning to read with Dr. Seuss I was petitioning my mother to buy me books on programming in BASIC (not that I skimped on Seuss, after all I am Stan I am and I love green eggs and ham). As I progressed through school I took every computer related class presented to me (sadly there weren't that many back then) and in my free time I read books on programming and built primitive video games and animations.
With all this time and energy devoted into computers I'm sure it should come as no surprise that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. An artist? Yes, an artist I wanted to sign my name to beautiful paintings and imposing sculptures. However, as I grew up outside forces convinced me that the only way to make a living as an artist was to be dead... which didn't seem like such a great living.
As a senior in High School I took an acting class on a whim and auditioned for a few plays. Surprisingly I was cast as one of the two leads in the first play I tried for, then the lead in the next play and the lead in the one after that as well, suddenly I wanted to be an actor when I grew up (actually it's not that surprising that I was cast, there was after all a limited talent pool to draw from, still I was excited). I suppose it's important to point out that I still "played around" on my computer even then making games and occasionally writing programs to do my math homework for me.
During college (which I started as a theater major, but eventually decided to major in graphic art) I was offered a job creating graphics for a small web company at what I thought of as a ridiculously huge hourly wage. It really wasn't that great of a wage but I would have needed 8 years of raises to get the same rate from the bookstore I was working for at the time. Besides, it seemed like a perfect unity of the only two things I really enjoyed doing, art and computers... why didn't I think of this before? Shortly after I started working there the guy who did all of the front-end web design work left the company and I was informed that they would not need me to create any new graphics until they found somebody to replace him, I walked the two blocks to the bookstore I had just stopped working for, bought a book on HTML web design and replaced him myself. The rest, as the cliché goes, was history.