I used to get free badges and t-shirts back in the late 80s for submitting POKEs for games, giving you unlimited lives, etc. I did a lot of that kind of hackin

I used to get free badges and t-shirts back in the late 80s for submitting POKEs for games, giving you unlimited lives, etc. I did a lot of that kind of hacking on the Spectrum machines back in the day, cracking the loader/protection, decompiling the games, and working out the fewest bytes that needed to be changed to keep the lives/energy/bullets/etc. Beyond that I shared a lot of freeware tools in the DOS days around 1992. Simple utilities to undelete files, and that kind of thing. From there I think my first fulltime job, working at a compiler company was around 1998. Happy times :)