I am basically a hacker at heart and have worked with computers since the early 1980's. My first PC had a whopping 10MB HD, wow. Now days they get more than that on the head of a pin;-) Worked with every version of MS DOS and Windows, (anyone remember Dos 4.0, hah;-), CPM, Minix, (forerunner to Linux), Linux, (several flavors), SUNOS, Solaris, and maybe a few I can't remember. Have done things with Assembly, BASIC, Pascal, C-List, JCL, SPF, SPF Edit-Macros, VSBASIC, (last 5 on IBM mainframe), SH, CSH, BASH, C, C++, Perl, currently trying to learn Java and java-scripting. Prior to the PC I worked with a TI-990 and also a Motorola M-6800 Exorcisor*. * That M-6800 I literally salvaged it from the scrap heap. The CPU itself was comprised of several cards approximately the size or a little larger than those in an IBM XT. It needed a separate Glass-TTY, (Dumb terminal. It had 8K of RAM, The boot sequence comprised of several commands and operation of toggle switches and/or push-buttons. It had a separate dual-floppy drive, (8-inch, single sided). Couldn't get the drive to work at first, the rods that the arms holding the read-heads were somewhat rusty. A little emery cloth and WD-40 took care of that. I could get it to seek but not read. Then I noticed the heads were not coming down very close to the diskette. Using my precision needle nosed pliars I managed to finess a tighter gap between them and walla, it works! I was extremely happy. Now I could perhaps get away from that hefty asssembler and use the MDOS and MBASIC diskettes. Nope, the system saw the filenames but it could not read the files to boot them. I had read something about that time that the directory tracks were problematic on diskettes being that they were on the outside. Because MDOS along with the directory listing printed the FAT for the files I took a new blank diskette and placed it in drive 2 and with the bad disk in drive 1 , used the internal EXBUG system to manually code the FAT, (not sure if that is exactly what they called that then), onto the new diskette. I then edited a copy of an assembler program for which I had source, which was a disk copy program and set it to copy just the tracks and sectors identified in the FAT I had typed. Ahhah! Success again. Another thing we did later on was figure out that we could cut a notch into the opposite edge of the diskette and also punch a hole in the proper location and we had what we calld "flippies" instead of floppies. We could then write on both sides, yippee. I found that Motorola had memory cards still available and ordered another 8K RAM card. Man, that compiler was smokin' then. Well so much for hacking but I still think that it was a great experience. For more about the Motorola 6800 please see: http://en.wikipedia.... i/Motorola_6800
If you want to know a little more about the hacking aspect mentioned above then see my response What motivates YOU to become a programmer?