The first IT book I ever read was a prize "30 hour basic" (I had won the school maths prize in 1982, the year I discovered my only solution for the rubic cube - "my greatest ever achievement" aged 11). I didn't really understand much more beyond the first chapter at first but I was captivated. Later when I went on develop a simple IT stock control system for my O level computer project, I went back to this book and understood the important of good modular design and using procedures and functions to avoid "spaghetti code".
In 1986, my father brought home an IBM PC AT, a physical huge machine, mostly green screen (text-based), and only the esoteric dos prompt to work from! At first none of the family had a clue how to use this machine. It was great, firstly I learn about DOS, my previous computers (BBC Model B, Commodore 64, Atari ST) had more basic operating systems with built in BASIS interpreters and uber-complex machine code (peeking and poking sprites was interesting but to tricky). Beyond the joys of DOS, my father wanted to know how to use word processors, write programs (the IBM BASIC language required which came with the machine required compiling) and use other applications, mostly text and command line based.
At school, I was studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Economics A levels. Good academic, logical subjects but no IT.
In 1988, I took a year-out to work as a research assistant in the Morgan Grenfell (in the heart of Londons Financial Captial - beautiful offices on Finsbury Square), then the Treasury (a magnificant building on the corner of Parliament Square and WhiteHall). In both these jobs, I was working with office applications: spreadsheets, word processors, charting tools, datastream, data query languages.. These were my first office jobs and not surprisingly I focused on IT and software, which in those days was seen as the preserve of the geeks (everything was still DOS based and so not very user friendly).
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