Writing an assembler in PL/1 that used up a whole box of punched cards (I think there were 2000 cards to a box). This was for a class project in my first year of college.
Using Unix for the first time on a PDP-11 and seeing how much nicer it was than the IBM mainframe operating systems of that era. Later being trusted with root on that machine.
Learning C and Pascal simultaneously to write a Pascal compiler in C using Lex and Yacc (another college class).
Writing code for a 6800 microprocessor with only 512 bytes of RAM (with the instructions entered on a hex keyboard).
Hacking an IBM operating system to be able to read files that I wasn't supposed to be able to read. This involved disassembling (by hand) one of the system programs and changing one of the machine instructions to make it an unconditional branch.
Writing code for one of the first IBM PCs.
Getting my first e-mail address with an "@" in it - on the Arpanet (precursor to the internet) in 1982.
Using Unix for the first time on a PDP-11 and seeing how much nicer it was than the IBM mainframe operating systems of that era. Later being trusted with root on that machine.
Learning C and Pascal simultaneously to write a Pascal compiler in C using Lex and Yacc (another college class).
Writing code for a 6800 microprocessor with only 512 bytes of RAM (with the instructions entered on a hex keyboard).
Hacking an IBM operating system to be able to read files that I wasn't supposed to be able to read. This involved disassembling (by hand) one of the system programs and changing one of the machine instructions to make it an unconditional branch.
Writing code for one of the first IBM PCs.
Getting my first e-mail address with an "@" in it - on the Arpanet (precursor to the internet) in 1982.
(Yeah, I'm well over 30.)