To be honest, this isn't really much of a hack. There are far more complicated things that can be done.
As for my story, it's pretty simple. I never liked limits, and I had a lot of people trying to impose them on me.
The earliest hack I can remember was sitting in the nursery at church. I would have been 5-6-ish years old at the time. My mother was in the choir, and I was bored, so I wandered around. The toys were stored in a cabinet, locked with a Master combination lock. I spent a fair amount of time manipulating it - feeling the mechanism out, finding the sticking points, getting a feel for where it would stick if the shackle was pulled on. I got it open by feel.
After that, I moved on to other things, like improvised picks with paperclips for my parent's filing cabinets. I discovered that cheap bike locks like this have a bit of wiggle on their dials when they are loose on the correct number.
The school district I was at was poor. The classrooms all had Apple IIs, so I was able to break out and mess around with ProDOS. Later, I convinced my grandparents to give me an old 8086 clone (Cordata 2MHz) they had sitting around and my family purchased a CompuAdd 286. It had a graphical interface of sorts (ASCII art).
Sometimes my games would drop me to a dos prompt, and I asked my parents why. Their answer, which sticks with me to this day, was one of the defining moments in my life. They told me not to worry about it, that I didn't need to know. They told me to simply type "dosshell" (to get back to this menu). I made it my personal crusade to know what was going on.
I started to collect DOS manuals and editions. PC DOS. MS DOS. Every version I could get my hands on. I saved up money to buy DOS manuals. I asked for them for birthday presents. I learned to use the terminal, and looked at the programs that came with them. DOS 2.11 (for example) had some neat TSRs and would play synthesized music, which I thought was awesome. They were written in BASIC. I started looking at other BASIC programs - grabbing old copies of 321 contact magazine (which had a basic program in each issue). My mother had a BASIC guide that she had of her own - I started modifying things, changing them. It became a bit of an obsession.
My parents tried to reign me in a bit, buying a piece of security software to lock me out without permission. I stayed up late that night, snuck down, bypassed the password and system (Direct Access 5.1), wrote a note about how I did it and went to bed. The internet opened up my horizons a bit. Before, I was on my own - now I had access to information, to hardware I couldn't get access to.
