Earliest memories feel like an old Italian movie (spent 1980 there). I can clearly remember Oliver North, the cold war, and my family's first microwave and VCR. (I wasn't all that well off). In grade school we had three lessons from a "computer guy" and were able to spend an hour every week or so on Apple II's.
EDIT: OH! And how could I forget the day we got a Colecovision! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColecoVision)
High School through the early nineties...we all still had big hair. Used a black and white Macintosh to write a program in Turing. For my class project, I had graphics of a missle blowing up a house if you got the question wrong, since I skipped ahead to the back of the book and read the appropriate section. I remember how scared people really were during desert shield. We thought it could be WWIII. Saddam's army was the 4th largest in the world.
Joined the army in the mid nineties. I remember seeing a buddy's 486 with windows 95 on it and thought that this internet thing was pretty cool, but not as cool as the GPS's we got to play with. I did my time and got out, went back to school and got into IT just as the dot com boom was at its height. Never made the mounds of cash others did.
Been stuck behind a computer in one form or another ever since.