I had taught myself HTML and Javascript as my first adventure into writing code. A PC gaming related sites I visited often started doing some dynamic pages with

I had taught myself HTML and Javascript as my first adventure into writing code. A PC gaming related sites I visited often started doing some dynamic pages with Perl (this was the late 90s), and I just thought that was the bees knees, so I went off to learn Perl. I wrote a simple guestbook style script for a little site I had, uploaded it, went to the browser and got a nice 'Internal Server Error'. I read every line of code I had written, couldnt find the error, then realized my FTP client was set to upload in binary rather than ASCII. Uploaded the script again in the right mode, went to the site, and it worked. I didn't even know the difference between the two at the time. It's not really an 'aha moment' that's on the same level as others mentioned here, but it was the first script I ever wrote. Before that, the dynamic portion of the internet seemed like magic. I've been hooked ever since. :)