Paper boy part time, not even sure what age, I have to try to figure that out. 14? Early mornings on bike
McDonald's the same store my two brothers worked at when I turned 16. My brothers are 6 and 8 years older than me so they were no longer working there. I think I could take it for 2 months but it was exhausting to me to remember all the movement steps so I went looking for a different job in the newspaper.
I started working from home in my parent's basement. First, building a social media system for the Commodore 64 like depicted in TV Show Halt and Catch Fire first season. Due to organization problems, I haven't been able to keep stuff and a lot got lost and stolen from storage units. My ZBBS app of 1985 wasn't a multi-person project like the one in Halt and Catch Fire, it was a one-man band and smaller scale. But I did manage to dig up on the Internet some rave reviews about the stability and security of my app compared to the competition. This was night and weekends in the basement and I operated a social media site on dialup. My mom helped me mail software sales to people. citation on customer reviews of my social media app ZBBS
After McDonad's still age 16, I got a real job at a Pentagon Military Contractor as an Apprentice. Telos Federal Systems. I had full access to a Digital VAX/VMS and I created the job opportunity by writing them a letter saying my high school had the same kind of computer that dost $100,000 and nobody knew how to use it - and they were posting classified advertisements in the newspaper so I said i would work minimum wage if I could have keys to the office and be allowed to take books home to read, I don't remember exactly how long I was at the job, but it was very valuable experience and the two guys who worked in the office gave me a lot of life advice.
I opened my own retail computer store related to #3 above on the list. Picked a terrible name "A Advanced Systems" and ran advertisements in the newspaper and phone book. Lasted 1 year, broke even or maybe some loss. Tried to sell high performance hot-rod computers but I was not good enough at marketing and sales to convince people to go with iBM OS;2 vs Microsoft Windows for home office.. I did get architects and engineers who liked my cheap hot rod computers but it was more like 6 or 8 computer sales a week. Overhead for me and one other employee was just too much.
The computer retail shop didn't have much to do. I tried writing a cash-register app in Visual Basic while I sat there. Allowing you to pick all the components of a hot-rod PC but I had troubles with the visual design of Windows and Visual Basic and just couldn't do as well as command line ZBBS (#3 above). So I decided I needed more learning. So I started reading more books about IBM OS/2 and I kept finding mistakes in the books I was selling IBM OS;2 on my home-built hot-rod computers and I would try out what the book said and it was all wrong. So one day, an author of a book comes to my shop about the advertisements in the Fort Wayne newspaper saying I'm selling cheap IBM OS;2 computers for everyday people. And I happened to have his book right there at the counter that I had read a few months erlier. I went to my retail machine and showed him the problems in the book. He then offered me a job technical editing his next book and writing some of the chapters. I published at least 4 books over the years about high-end sophisticated computer usage. Book ISBN 1-56592-545-9: page xiii, "and heavy hitter Stephen Gutknecht chipped in with the original versions of Chapters 14, 15, and 17". I try to be a simple man and modest, but SOMEtimes when on street fights with Russian gangs on social media, you have to defend yourself. And Google Search shows context of this quote too.
I worked at Radio Shack in New Haven, Indiana. I forget when, a summer job" A few months? it was a slow retail period and we were lucky to get 2 customers come in every hour at the strip-mall location.
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I as fired from the job I held for 2.5 years that was peak of being SysOp / System Admin. August 1999 or so. I was debt free but didn't have much cash and zero incoime. I decided to write an retail store webapp from scratch in ASP called HomeCoast and I moved December 1, 1999 ti Lake Havasu City Arizona in my 1967 VW Camper van.