One of my proudest hacker moments was also one of my first: debugging a noisy console session whose transport was RS232. Long story short (it was 30 years ago

One of my proudest hacker moments was also one of my first: debugging a noisy console session whose transport was RS232. Long story short (it was 30 years ago so I also can’t remember the precise diagnosis) there was corruption on the line in that sometimes when you typed a space it would come out as something random. Few other characters were corrupted as often, if at all. It was almost always spaces that were showing up as random other characters. My observation was that space was encoded as 00000 — all low, the printed character most susceptible to line noise — and that something wasn’t grounded. Smarter people took my observation, figured out what was wrong, and soon all was fixed. It felt like, for the first time, I understood the system with a depth I’d not had before. It was cool. Oh, and playing DOOM for the first time over RS232, too. Another precious memory indeed!