What inspired me was family history. I began tracing my family genealogy back in the early 80's and soon had reams of paper filled with data. Knew I couldn't grow to much without being overwhelmed with 3-ring binders, so decided to build a program to house the data. As the genealogy branched and grew, so did the sophistication of my early databases. By the early 90's, I knew more about databases (and my family!) than any else I knew, so changed careers and became a database programmer. Today, everything is on SQL Servers and served up on the web. As databases go, the application is small, but as family genealogies go it's very, very large (over 13,000 entries) and still growing. What started with a 5-volume series of books with 600 pages of genealogies today would span over 5000 pages and could not realistically be published again. Thank goodness for the web!