A long road. 

Started with a Commodore 64  and a bookkeeping program and a program I wrote to determine cost  of storage and drying vs sale in 3 months.

Moved to an IBM portable, converted above programs to a different format

Moved to IBM XT,  receive Dbase from a  family member and converted above programs to a different format. then bought a network kit and learned how to do networking.

Was asked to write a simple program to mix fertilizer for a friend.

That program kept expanding to thousands of lines of code.  Was sold and the company needed it to communicate via telephone with a printer in another town.  This kind of thing kept expanding.  I knew a person who had a business and fixed his computer and he asked if I knew anything about networks so I became their IT guy at the same time other people found I could fix computer problems.  Word spreads.

There's a lot more but that's kind of basic.

My feeling is, be careful In America what you do for fun,  it can turn into a job or career.