[dhouston]

+1 — cut my teeth on learning C in middle school by hacking up a DikuMUD derivative. So many great memories of that period.

And not just C but Linux (Slackware!), sockets, even kludging the single-player DOS port to be two-player by playing over a serial cable to another PC. And annoying my future Dropbox teammates by including an extra space after/before parens in function calls (and if/for/switch statements), putting { on its own line, etc as was the convention in that code base IIRC.