I always found myself feeling like a fake...No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled.
These things are exciting to me
And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them.
I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!