One summer in my childhood, my parents decided to severely restrict my siblings and I's access to the internet for unspecified reasons. We were each allowed 30 minutes use of the family computer and its Internet connection, which was "locked down" by passwords on the BIOS and Windows 98 screensaver. The laptop I shared with my brother and sister was still connected to our home LAN (through one of those crazy Intel AnyPoint phoneline network adapters) so we could print out summer schoolwork and such at our leisure, but Internet access was completely firewalled off.

The collaboration between my brother and I to get around these restrictions is one of the earliest memories I have of fruitful "hacking." At the time we both played (and I was obsessed with) a particular MUD, and a half hour per day was not enough playing time, so we wrote a very crude proxy server in VB6 over a week (7 hours between us) that hid in the system tray with a very "system" sounding process name and icon. That way we could connect to the MUD in secret from the laptop, hidden away in our bedroom. I think we later wrote a terrible, barely functional HTTP proxy too. We pulled a few more tricks like reverse engineering the screensaver password (it was stored as a hex string in the registry or something), which turned out to be the same as the BIOS password, before my parents caught onto what we were doing and kind of gave up (maybe they even saw it as a positive learning experience, who knows).

That summer introduced me to the idea that a computer is totally malleable in the hands of a determined and motivated person equipped with the right tools. I haven't looked back since.