Self taught. No choice about that in 1967. No computers in schools, no such thing as a CS degree, and anyway for family reasons I had to drop out. By pure chance I got a job as a computer commissioning tech at a local computer manufacturer - Elliott Brothers Automation; my job was to take room sized discrete component mainframes from their hand-wired manufacturing stage and make them work so they could be shipped to their new owners (typically universities or research labs). First day on the job, 19 years old, they lead me to a work station, point at the 'scope, the Crown sized blueprints, and the machine, and say "make it work. See you at lunch". I did. Both. No idea how, pure babe in the woods, but turned out my mind just works that way. So after a few months, I had noticed they turned the reference machine off outside 9-5 work hours, and got permission to turn it back on for my own purposes. The rest is history.

I have been at this for over 45 years as a cross-disciplinary hardware and software designer ever since. Still techie, at 66 years old, still nicely gainfully employed, still young at heart (if with a few creaky bits now:). Still mostly self taught, still inventing stuff that did not exist before. Yes, along the way for my own satisfaction I got the B. Sc and most of an M. Sc, but neither were required by my employers. Also, as somebody already mentioned, I have been recruited to every change in my career, or founded start-ups (with funding based on my design abilities), by people who knew me. Other than that first chance, I have never got a job by submitting a resume. And even that first job was by referral from an interviewer for a different job, after we had chatted for a while. Every change always started with my phone ringing.

I do not attribute this career to inborn talent, although I certainly turned out to have some. I attribute it to wide eyed curiosity and a perpetual feeling of "what? you want to actually _pay_ me to do this?", and its concomitant continuous learning and inventing. And to nobody telling me what I wanted to do was impossible.