Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about “artificial life” — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like “when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant,” I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
Some cool stuff: I went to a cs high school kind of deal and we learned some pretty fun stuff, then were encouraged to experiment:
teacher showed us to render the Mandelbrot set, and when I had that written I wrote a little thing that lets you zoom into it (it was buggy, but who cares! Infinite fractals!)
in school, I installed Linux on my pc, played around and then fucked up my primary disk’s boot sector and partition table. That meant my DOS install would be fucked up too (and I needed that for homework!), so I read up on MBRs and realized that if I remember the size of the partition, I can restore it to how it was.… and ext2 gives you a correct size even if the partition table is screwy, meaning that with the first primary partition activated I could find the correct size and then make an entry for the second one, and so on, until everything was working again. Data loss prevented!
I’d written a pretty good solution to a homework problem in C, but typo’d a cleanup command and deleted the source file. The previous data loss scenario had prepared me: I rebooted into a rescue disk, grepped the disk drive for parts of the source and got the file back! (Got multiple copies of the file back, in fact. That’s when I started using version control, hah)
Speaking of data loss, I once had just finished a physics lab assignment in OpenOffice and planned to print it off and walk to the University, 4 miles away, shortly.
Unfortunately an extremely confusing quirk of the OpenOffice file “recovery” UI meant that I clicked the wrong button and it helpfully deleted my document for me. I then spent the next hour learning Linux file recovery from scratch including finding and compiling a data recovery tool from source and learning about inodes.
In the end I managed to recover everything except for the images embedded in the document, hastily recreated them, and then ran the four miles to the university (my body would not be able to take that today haha)
the classic! your recovery from this was a lot smarter than mine — I think losing my data on Linux was what got me started on BSD
LOL, now that you mention it, I think installing FreeBSD was exactly the thing that got my MBR blown up that way. Ever since, I’ve taken a snapshot of the first 512 bytes of any bios-formatted drive…