Long time hobbyist and professional firmware programmer.
I was bitten by the bug in 1978 when my father brought home a shiny new Radio Shack TRS-80. I worked my way through David Lein's BASIC tutorial and started writing little games. Then came the Level II upgrade, with 12K of RAM and a new BASIC with access to machine language routines through the USR() built-in, and that was that.
Ever since, I've worked with small systems, mostly Microchip's 8-bit PICs.