Playing a
Star Trek text adventure when I was 6 on a machine in my home town's university. It might have been a PDP/8 - the output was in greenbar rather than on a screen - but I'll never know.
Debating the merits of a full blown computer versus a then similarly priced SpectraVideo Compumate for our Atari 2600. The computer won out, I asked for and received a VIC-20 and datasette for Christmas.
Attempting to write a text adventure on the Vic (and failing).
Using random SYS codes on Scott Adams Adventures cartridges for the VIC and forcing all kinds of fun stuff to happen
including finding a hidden cheat/hint file in the Adventureland cartridge.
Getting my C64 and programming sprites in BASIC. Attempting to write a flight sim in same.
The day I got my A500. 512kb RAM?
all I'd ever need (until of course I needed more chip memory to do anything fun with, and it's been downhill from there).
I don't know about "memorable" but "horrifying" when I sold my A1200. At the time it was my sole computer, so communicating with the buyer was thru email, using other folks' systems. In the time it took me to box it up and send it he decided I was taking too long (it was about 1 week from putting it up, accepting his purchase, and getting it out the door - taking too long my ass). So I said "Fine, %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! you, refuse the package and send it back". It came back, and in the downtime a local buyer purchased it. When it got here the HD was detached from the mounting bracket, the system wouldn't start...it was awful. The buyer here was very patient and suggested I reseat everything including the 030 card. I did, it started, he bought it.
Later, blowing up my 100mhz 486 I'd sold the Amiga for - and having a dear friend help me get it working again (well, I wound up with an 80mhz machine; the board for the '486 was dead and I guess whomever she got to fix it took the chip or it wouldn't work on the new board or whatever)...
Building my first system for pay for someone, realizing I had thousands of bucks of hardware on the dining room table and if I'd hooked something up wrong...poof.
Setting up a dos script to repair Win95's registry; for about 2 years my sole HD was a 170mb connor that had bad sectors on it. Win 95 would run reliably for about...oh, a week, then it would start blue-screening. So I set up a program on floppy that would, on startup:
- Mount my ZIP drive (which I wouldn't have bought if I'd had a lick of sense
)
- Copy the registry to it
...then windows would start.
I had a rescue floppy that I'd put in if I started getting registry errors, and it would mount and copy the registry back. I suffered like that for about a year...
A friend offering me a 500mb SCSI HD out of his SGI to replace my dying HD with, but I didn't have a SCSI controller, and even back then a lowly Adaptec AHA1542 was out of my price range.