[jgoerzen]

I think it's great that you broke the system so badly. You then got to fix it, and you also learned that you have the ability to fix it even when it's terribly broken.

Ultimately, if you don't have the ability to break things, you don't truly have the ability to experiment and discover.

[AlexDanger]

As a young child Dad let me use his XT when he wasnt working. I'd tinker and change settings to see what they did. Occasionally I'd break something and would sweat it out to find a fix before Dad found out. It was a good motivator.

[scalable]

Assuming he did fix it. I remember the time I had some annoyances with my boot loader. After several tries at fixing it, I thought "I should get a clean start, lets dd zeros to mbr!". I did recover from that but it took so much time I didn't want to ever go through anything like it again.

I never recovered from losing a truecrypt password once.

Linux from scratch taught me that Linux is magic, and that if you deviate the slightest amount from the instructions, or try to customize anything, you are in for a world of pain.

[bornhuetter]

The C64 was great for that too, in a different way. You could do absolutely anything, mess it up in any way - peek and poke random system stuff - and you were one reset away from it being fine again.

[jiri]

I really miss this behaviour of 8bit era. I guess that things get soo complicated today and advanced information are soo easy to find that this state is not possible to achieve anymore. You can screw up even a smartphone by "poking" around too much.

[VMG]

That's why 0x10c and the DCPU16 are gaining so much popularity