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!
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)