I was a sophomore in college (doing linguistics) in 1996, and I belonged to the CONLANG mailing list (community for people who invent their own languages (spoken and otherwise)). Someone had posted a Perl4 program to generate a vocabulary based on a phonology you configured it with. I had no idea what Perl even was--the last programming I had done was BASIC on an Apple II in 5th grade. I got the Llama book and banged on the program for hours. My life was changed. :)

http://www.nodewarrior.org/chris/