Embarrassing childhood revelations, vol. 3

Once upon a time, during a family trip to the Cranbrook Museum, I came across an Apple II computer in what used to be the geology (read: rocks) section. It had some interactive program discussing rocks, and possibly radioactivity.

I was a youth -- stupid, but familiar with how Apple II computers worked. So out of boredom I hit the restart keystroke combination to bring myself to the BASIC prompt. Then in a classic move of stupidity, I typed "list" and hit enter.

Line after line of the program started scrolling up the screen. It soon became clear that the software was thousands of lines long, and wouldn't stop anytime soon. I panicked because I was not able to bring the computer back to normal, and ran away. A couple of minutes later, I admitted to my father that I had just messed up one of the computers, and together we told a curator so they could restore the machine back to normal. (I think it simply involved another restart, which wasn't obvious at the time.) And later, of course, I got punished.

Moral of the story: don't fuck with computers that aren't yours!