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Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

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Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#1
In my case, it was discovering that my DOS 6.22 disks came with an open source game called GORILLA.BAS.

Soon after tearing that code apart, I found myself intensely working through Denthor and NeHe's tuts, and some time later, I now enjoy writing software for a living.

Life sure would have been different had I not explored those disks.

Can anyone relate?

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#2
Music geek here.

The Fostex Four track tape recorder was my discovery. My brother and I wore it out. Mom got us a software DAW shortly after.

Fast forward several years, brother ends up at The Village recording studio in LA, works directly with Steven Stills. Not as cool, but I performed for an opener for Head East around the same time. Good times.

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#3

Music geek here. The Fostex Four track tape recorder was my discovery. My brother and I wore it out. Mom got us a software DAW shortly after. Fast forward several years, brother ends up at The Village recording studio in LA, works directly with Steven Stills. Not as cool, but I performed for an opener for Head East around the same time. Good times.

Interesting story. Oscar winning and legendary Indian composer AR Rahman said the same thing about the Fostex.

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#6
Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very working class background where people didnt do such things.

Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned UNIX. which led to my entire career.

*They were weird. Looked like tower PCs but ran some variant of SunOS on i386. I never saw them again.

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#8

Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very working class background where people didnt do such things. Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned…

Man, I had forgotten entirely about roadrunners. I am pretty sure when I went to Sun Micro for Java training in the 90s, we learned Java on computers that were called roadrunners.

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#9
In the late 80s, I delivered the Washington Post as a 9 year old — I skimmed the articles daily and one about local BBS sites with phone numbers fascinated me.

I called the numbers and heard weird noises. I was beyond intrigued and had to understand this new world.

8 months saving for a Commodore 64, 6 months saving for a 300 baud modem and I was hooked!

Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?

#10
My experience was I worked really hard to write an english paper in school. My teacher gave it a C or a B- or something. I asked him why and he was unable to answer and threw a tantrum of sorts about it and proceeded to accuse me of grade grubbing.

After that, I realized education contained highly arbitrary, personality driven decisions and completely lost interest in working hard for school ever again.

The discovery that grading systems, in general, are not "fair" in that they don't seem to actually adhere to logical criteria ended my interest in school. I concluded that what was being graded was actually your likability to teachers. Being unlikable, that was a losing game for me :) So I mentally checked out.

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