> Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to were cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would throw away I used to do this kind of thing.

That was me well into my 20s :) Win2k broke, and I was broke, so the only option was to install linux.

It paved the way for me to get into programming, not so much shell scripts, but just the powerful idea that computer systems were malleable things you could change - something not really obvious for those of us who cut our teeth on MS Windows.