So nostalgic. This brings me back to a time when computing was fun, but also fraught with danger. I can't even recall the number of times 13-year-old me totally

So nostalgic. This brings me back to a time when computing was fun, but also fraught with danger. I can't even recall the number of times 13-year-old me totally screwed up trying to install Mandrake 7 or some such misadventure, and had to sweat through getting it to boot again without the aid of any other internet-connected device. I believe once or twice I even called a friend and asked them to look something up and read it to me over the phone. It's an obscure beginning, but the first time I ever wrote something that could rightfully be considered "code" was mIRC scripting language. You could find DLLs that would extend mIRC with arbitrary functionality. I figured out how to open a socket, listen for incoming connections and just by printing out what I saw when I pointed the browser at localhost I reverse engineered HTTP and created a shitty web server in mIRC. I remember it would serve a text file just fine, but images usually got corrupted. I think mIRC sockets were only intended for text, or there was a distinction between text and binary variables or something. Later I used an mIRC DLL extension to control the mouse, my shitty web server, some program the took a screenshot once per second, a real web server, a dynamic DNS service, and a dial-up timed dialer to cobble together something that connected my computer to the internet during my "computer applications" class at school and let me remote control it. Of course, there was nothing I needed on my PC at home, and nothing worth doing on it with a janky setup that only refreshed after each click, but it was fun to make. I miss those days. Every download was exciting and new, it seemed like there was a vast frontier of unexplored internet, software, IRC channels, and things I could make. Now I sit down at my computer and check about 4 sites, have trouble focusing on making anything interesting, and generally do not have the same thrill. I wonder how much of it has to do with not being 13, and how much has to do with the modern internet.