I was this kid in my day. I had an extremely high-end PC that I built myself (to date myself, it cost well over $6,000[0] and was a home-built 486DX50 (
right when they came out) maxed out motherboard RAM (that
might have been 16MB but memory escapes me), a Turtle Beach Wave Table Synth sound card, a video card capable of powering a display at 1152x1024 on a 16" CRT display. I ran a multi-node BBS on two 9600, then 16.8K modems.
Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have never become a software developer.
I had the honor of building a gaming PC for a neighbor kid and watched over four years as he (unbeknownst to him) became a very competent geek. A few years of tweaking settings in games to eek out a higher frame-rate, fighting with firmware updates, video card drivers, software updates and every other bit of mayhem that the words "I want to game on my PC" evoke, and you pick up a wealth of knowledge "by accident".
I hadn't talked to the kid in four years; met up with him, again, recently and I was blown away. First thing he does is pull a "Flipper Zero" out of his pocket and tells me about all of the crazy things he's done with it.
He is as capable as any systems guy I've ever talked to. He has no clue that he has this skill, either.
It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him. This year, my daughter (she's two years younger) begged me to build her a desktop, so she's getting a really nice Christmas followed by a year of learning/frustration. :)
Oh, and the fam got a Flipper Zero this year, too. Can't have the neighbor kid have all the fun.
[0] I saved up the money to afford it by building computers for other people.
Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have never become a software developer.
I had the honor of building a gaming PC for a neighbor kid and watched over four years as he (unbeknownst to him) became a very competent geek. A few years of tweaking settings in games to eek out a higher frame-rate, fighting with firmware updates, video card drivers, software updates and every other bit of mayhem that the words "I want to game on my PC" evoke, and you pick up a wealth of knowledge "by accident".
I hadn't talked to the kid in four years; met up with him, again, recently and I was blown away. First thing he does is pull a "Flipper Zero" out of his pocket and tells me about all of the crazy things he's done with it.
He is as capable as any systems guy I've ever talked to. He has no clue that he has this skill, either.
It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him. This year, my daughter (she's two years younger) begged me to build her a desktop, so she's getting a really nice Christmas followed by a year of learning/frustration. :)
Oh, and the fam got a Flipper Zero this year, too. Can't have the neighbor kid have all the fun.
[0] I saved up the money to afford it by building computers for other people.