Interesting read. Reminds me a lot of my youth. I started in the DOS 2.x days. Didnt know how to type, made a mistake and the computer did something different. Took the time to bake up and understand what i did and how the comouter responded (largely how I learned vim nearly 20 years ago).<p>Did my first substantial programming using the Zilog Z80 assembly. I didn't kno2 about the stack, let alone how to use it, so the code was bad and bloated. But i kept working on it until it worked. It was probably 1000x larger than it needed to be because I didnt understand functions, but it worked. When i first played w Linux was in the late 90s. I knew it was dangerous to dual boot, so i spent the money to buy a 2nd 4GB HD. Probably coat me a couple hundred bucks at the time. Still managed to trash the main drive's partition table. Dont know how, dont recall why, dont recall how I "fixed" it, but restored the Windows 95 drive to working order, but it would report different drive sizes for C: depending on where in the OS you looked (i did have to manually edit a partition table as part of the fix)