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:
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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!)
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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!
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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)
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…