When I was in grade school, I started reading library books, and gravitated towards the programming books. They were mostly BASIC on Apple IIe hardware. I used BASIC on whatever hardware I could get my hands on, and my mom bought me a calculator that had a BASIC interpreter. Even once we got a PC, its capabilities were sub-par. I didn&#x27;t get a machine that reflected the state of the art until I built one myself in the late nineties.<p>Having severely-limited hardware made me invest lots and lots of time into figuring out how it worked. I would like to pass that experience on to my kids, so they can be masters of their own technology world instead of passive consumers of other peoples&#x27;.<p>Did you screw up your machine? Do you know how to re-install the OS? Here&#x27;s a printout of the page that tells you how. Have data you didn&#x27;t back up? Well, here&#x27;s a protip, you can mount the hard disk on another machine, maybe your sister will let you use hers.