I owe my whole career to my stubborness and a broken ribbon cable to HDD on a 286. countless hours and library time to figure out to read HDD with only DOS debug program, and int13. Ooo man i wish i have the same patience and stubborness now
For me it was writing a program to balance my mums household accounts on a ZX Spectrum and figuring out how to load/save data to a tape.
Bless her she actually used it even though it was about as much work as doing it by hand.
I think she was just trying to keep an excited 9yo happy.
It ended up been rather more sophisticated than the original plan.
It was like stepping into the future.
Shortly after I got my hands on a 386 Elonex laptop with B&W VGA and it was amazing (I got it from a family friend who was binning it, the ribbon between the screen and the base had snapped and it was a 50p part for a machine that was selling well north of a 1000 at the time).