It was about 1998 to 2000, somewhere there. I was 14ish, and I got 6, 486dx 33MHz machines by literally pulling them out of the trash after my high school threw

It was about 1998 to 2000, somewhere there. I was 14ish, and I got 6, 486dx 33MHz machines by literally pulling them out of the trash after my high school threw them away. I connected two of them with serial cables and spent about 6 months in DOS with Djgpp compiler and dos IDE, I used a chess library and coded in C, and I finally got the two machines to play chess against each other, client / server architecture using a serial protocol I invented - state was held on the server but transmitted to the client and the client made the decision and sent state to server. Pretty inefficient but I was very young and self taught. The feeling of pure joy when i finally got them working and I watched the moves scrolling down the screen. I was hooked on programming