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I also dropped out of high school (and never bothered to get a GED; I went to college for a while and then dropped out to do a startup, so I've ended up with neither diploma).

It's kind of fun being able to put "high school dropout" on forms, while not being a deadbeat.

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I'm impressed you got a college to accept your application without some kind of high school equivalency certification. How'd you manage that?

A few years out of school, however, and it's become very clear to me that "I just worked on this project for 6 months where we learned XYZ, had some hard times and eventually failed/succeeded/moved on." is much more attractive to the kind of people I want to work with than "I graduated cum laude from XYZ special university."

I was 16. MIT doesn't really care about high school diplomas. I'd already done 1580/1600 SAT and had a grad student and associate prof at MIT write letters of recommendation based on performance in a summer program (social engineering...)