I still love to revive old hardware and push it beyond it limits. Mostly because i think it's fun, but also because it's dirt cheap or free. Back then made an old GPS system play Monkey Island or mp3's or read E-books. Reinstalled lots of old Android phones and tablets. Made photo frames out of them. Made webcams out of them. Transformed old laptops into Chromebooks. Make lots of old NAS devices work again. Stuff like that.

I got a cracked copy of 3ds Max at a LAN party (back when it was "Discreet 3dsmax"), and immediately dragged dozens of cubes, spheres, and cones into the scene.

Then I closed it for a year. Opened it up again one day, followed a box-modeling tutorial (from the documentation PDF linked in the Help menu!), and I was hooked. Spline modeling, rigging, walk cycles, texturing, lighting experiments, every spare minute for the rest of high school.

I still remember the whole-body panic of accidentally turning on "adaptive degradation", which replaced all meshes with their bounding cubes when rotating the viewport camera, and thinking I had broken my video card.