Ask HN: Computer nostalgia

I'm not over 30 (turned 21 this year) but I do have some rather fond memories of breaking, and subsequently fixing, my family Dell running Windows 95. I used the internet, but not for anything major. I mostly just explored the computer, learned how it worked, and practiced my creative writing in early MS Word.

I did write some batch files really early on, thanks to my dad's answer when I asked how the computer worked: "It's just a bunch of text files". After that, I didn't do much other than explore networking stuff at school (and use the school's LAN to distribute games, but I was 12 at this point and well into the 2000's).

In 2003 our school still had a class with old machines what should boot from a ROM into some BASIC environment. I was actively reading books on computers at that moment, however, without any access to the hardware, so I was using any available option to walk into that room and to fix errors in someone's code. Then we started learning graphics, and I actually tried to draw something on a sheet of paper with 1x1 mm cells and then code it by putting points in these places. Other folks did strange things too --- the pixels in the displays were not exactly square, so someone tried to make a circle out of points, adjusting them so that it looked more round than the standard one.

A year after the school bought about a dozen Windows machines and the fun was over (just until we figured out some ways of obtaining admin rights there and doing strange things like renaming all computers to what look like "COMP-12" (all these letters are present in the Russian locale, so unique same-looking names are possible)).

That sweet sound.