Lol his reward was I retired from family tech support and gave the reins to him. He loved it at first but realized it for the curse it was within a few months.

Hes given it back to me by refusing to call my parents back when they call asking for help. I'd ground him but he's an adult and my shenanigans don't mean much anymore 😂

I was already really interested in computers myself. My own explosion of interest was a game called WarioWare: D.I.Y. that let you make minigames using a built-in editor.

Similar situation: I legit taught myself how to use aircrack-ng when I was like 12 because I wanted to play Mario Kart on my grandma's Wii, but it needed internet to download an update, which she didn't have. However, the neighbor had a WEP-encrypted network, and I was staying the night. The rest is history.

For me it was my older brother (who owned the only computer in the house). He had very strict rules about what I could do on his PC but even then he would only leave his room unlocked once a week at most. This was before I even cared for internet so being offline was no big deal.

When I was 13 I managed to talk my way into doing some chores for a neighborhood PC school in exchange for access to computers whenever there was some free spot in any of their classes. A couple years later they opened a Lan House so I worked there and could finally use PCs all day every day. One more year and I was already teaching programming classes there (well, trying to).

I’m older, so my entry point was “I wanna make my OWN Marios”

Funny... it was the strippers on Duke Numke 3D for me...