If that was truly the first bit of real code you wrote, it's pretty darned impressive. Comparable to learning to swim by jumping in at the deep end of a pool that's full of sharks, razor blades, and coliform bacteria.
I was proud of it, but really homework assignments tend to be toy problems. As complex as they can get (which really isn’t that complex) they don’t do anything.
It was a known problem, with snippets floating about. Understanding what it did and why it should work took a bit more. Then again, the first technical book I read for myself instead of for class what’s the Comer TCP/IP books, which hardly anybody did at the time and definitely nobody does now.
Then I had to explain it to several other people who had the same problems. Seems a lot of copy and paste went on among that community.