Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?

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

Pirating "gamez" and warez on IRC, back when it was cool to have coloured text announcements spamming the channel from a hundred dcc bots, and listening to the chip tunes included on all the MYTH and CLASS cracktros.

ResEdit in the mid-to-late 90s was such a fun toy as well.

80s: Mario, 90s: Wolfenstein and Final Fantasy, 00s: WoW, 10s: Minecraft. (I'm a game programmer, so it's relevant to my career. I mark every era by which games are most inspiring.)

I began programming in 1968. 50 years later I can't think of anything I'm nostalgic about. There were some OK to Good times, but nothing stands out. I'd rather have done something else. I do recall first reading Tog's edition of Macintosh User Interface Guidelines as opening up my perspective. For lack of anything else I'd choose it.