What made you a programmer

What is that special mix of circumstances that made you start programming?

In the former Soviet Union, education and science were highly esteemed and even poor families were striving to seem "educated", trying to make their children smarter, there were constant pressure to improve one errors and failure was punished, sometimes physically.
There was actually a system which would make one sick of education, and it certainly was not effective for the masses of retards which were produced by schools, though there were a small elite which learned on their own, since books and libraries were cheap.
I can attribute everything only to myself and the idea of exploring the internal working of system, such as a computer from the ground up.
The first 286(there were cheap since the hardware was old at the time) which was loaded with MSDOS bundled with a couple of stacks of 5.25 floppies seemed deceptively simple, and i was set to improve it with batch files(which i found out first), discovering eventually how the programs are made(Quickbasic,Turbo pascal,Borland C) and making a couple of small programs in Basic.
I don't learn by the book, by a rigid system or some form of education, i prefer to explore things myself until i get a clear picture of the stuff.
So when i seen Qbasic failing to do something another program did, i've tried to deduce what that feature was made of and tried to replicate it with Qbasic, though this didn't work quite well for everything(like hardware access, since i didn't know anything about drivers/TSRs/interrupts beyond the basic idea of video modes).