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> My first "programming" experience was with mIRC scripts. I even wrote an IRC client using mIRC sockets at some point, and a dummy webserver / SMTP client.

Same here! The mIRC scripting language was incredibly rich, and the ability to create native Windows dialogs with it was a powerful tool.

Back in the 90s, a friend and I reverse engineered the protocol behind a popular program used to play Magic the Gathering online called Apprentice. The protocol was insecure and allowed users to cheat by controlling the outcome of coin flips and other elements of the game. The purpose of the research was to prove definitively that the client could be manipulated, in order to resolve some cheating accusations that had been thrown around.

I set out to write a program that would hook into Apprentice through the Win32 API and allow you to change the program's output, while my friend created an mIRC man-in-the-middle server that you could configure through a dialog box to connect to Apprentice and modify incoming and outgoing protocol messages.

My project never shipped and his reached widespread availability, eventually leading to the development of better clients [1]. The fact that he was able to get so much out of mIRC script (dialog boxes, sockets, event handling, etc) and was able to make it simple for others to use was impressive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_(software)#Backwash