At the age of 4, I was fascinated with photographs I always saw in magazines, books, etc. They were like a window to different parts of the world, moments in time, people, places, etc. The way light was captured, expressions, etc were fascinating to me...though i had no idea what any of that meant.
When I was 5, visiting my father in New York in 1974, he bought me a Kodak 110 Instamatic with a few rolls of B&W film...I hadn't been in the city before, and found myself wanting to take photos looking up at the tall buildings and the clouds passing by - two huge new towers were just being finished, and they were so amazingly huge - they were my first photographs. I dabbled in taking random snaps of things over the years, without really knowing my way around photography - just letting the instamatic do the work while I did the framing. When I was 10, my dad thought I might do better with a more capable camera, so my Christmas present was a Pentax ME Super SLR with the stock 50mm F1.8 lens and an Osawa 70-200 zoom. I still didn't know much about photography, but I learned the basic concept of adjusting the aperture wheel until I got the metering indicator into the '0' position...often using the 1/125 setting on the dial as a sort-of early auto mode. I still was a snapshooter, rather than a true photographer, but the compositional bug had already taken hold...just not the technique and technical knowledge. That camera is still in my closet today, and still works - though I had gotten a few SLRs along the way in the 90's including a Canon EOS and two lenses which I used for my first more serious shooting.
But the real evolution in my photography came in 1997, when I decided to buy my first of this new type of technology - a Digital Camera. My first was a Sony Mavica FD91, a big, heavy, floppy-disk camera with 1MP, but that let me see the first example of digital camera 'live view' - seeing exposure, white balance, etc portrayed on a screen before even pressing the shutter. It was the first time I could use a spot meter and actually see the exposure changing before my eye as I moved it around the screen - leading to my first real understanding of light and how to control or manipulate it. I could see how setting the white balance helped me avoid those weird blue photos I'd occasionally get with my SLRs when shooting on a white boat in a blue sea, where everything looked tinted blue. I also had my first brush with seriously big telephoto reach, as that camera had a huge 15x stabilized optical zoom for 540mm equivalent.
I had gone from composing shots, to actually learning how to control light, composition, depth, color and white balance, and understanding shutter speed/motion relationships. All of which I never really learned in the SLR days. Part of that was the live view advantage of digital, and part was that shooting unlimited photos was essentially free - or at least no more than the cost of a few floppy disks...no more expensive rolls of film and expensive developing...leaving me free to take 10 shots at different settings of the same thing until i saw which was right....and learning through experience.
I've migrated since back into DSLRs, to regain the lens selection, flexibility, and control, and now that live view helped me understand and learn, I can use OVFs again with confidence in my settings for a given situation. More than anything though, i can create those shots that I had seen so long ago in the magazines that started me on the photography path in the first place! And capturing those moments, creating windows for others to enjoy looking through, is what photography is all about for me.
It was several years ago but it taught me to shoot from my instinct and not rely on a machine to think for me all the time. 
