[snarfy]

My most used program was a 7 byte .COM I wrote with debug.exe. It made the machine reboot. It took about 15 seconds to write. A friend who worked at the college ended up using it in their scripts. They had a way to do it before but it wasn't as reliable as my little program. That college's infrastructure was used as a model for the rest of the district and so my little program spread to the other colleges.

[oogali]

jmp f000:e05b

Between fiddling with debug.exe and discovering that fixed address, that put me on the path to demystifying technology (or at least understanding everything is approachable).

[jpalawaga]

I feel like everyone has an ah-ha moment when software's facade of magic gives way to a genuine feeling that nothing in software is inunderstandable.

I was helping my brother through some CS classes, and he had to use some sort of graphics library, and things just weren't clicking. I opened the source of the graphics library so he could see what was going on under the hood and he was like "whoa... It's all just... Regular code..."

Demystifying indeed.

[ElFitz]

I remember when a friend and I, both with barely any experience at all, tried building our first SaaS.

We went crazy over access control, roles, etc, wondering how operating systems and databases did it, driving ourselves mad over how to implement it at the lowest possible levels so the rest of the stack couldn’t possibly go around it…

We were pretty certain there was some highly complex dark magic behind it all.

A few years later, I worked on a project where we built a SaaS MVP for a client, with access control.

Turns out most people apparently consider ABAC overkill and will go with a few simple if statements if they can afford to.

[nuclearnice3]

I showed a friend telnet yahoo port 80 GET.

"wait. it's .. just ... text!"