As an analogy and anecdote, I've learned a lot about cars through RC racing as a teen. Building differentials, CVDs and Universal Joints, hydraulic shocks towers, and tuning radios really gave me the baseline to know and fix cars as an adult.
I still lack a very basic understanding of computers which has somewhat neutered what I'm capable of doing today. I'm now sorta getting back into learning these things but it's kinda hard when it is limited to weekends and holidays. I hope RPI keeps going with their vision as a publicly traded company. Kids need to learn these things.
Ever thought of writing an emulator? On Reddit theres /r/EmuDev which is a nice place.
For example you could start by writing a CHIP8 emu, then a Space Invaders Emu. After Space Invaders most people write a Game Boy(almost same CPU as Space Invaders and hardware is well documented) emu, but you could try to do a 8086 PC if you want to know more about "real" computers.
There are free BIOS you can use, and FreeDOS, and then rest of the machine is pretty well documented.
As an analogy and anecdote, I've learned a lot about cars through RC racing as a teen. Building differentials, CVDs and Universal Joints, hydraulic shocks towers, and tuning radios really gave me the baseline to know and fix cars as an adult.
I still lack a very basic understanding of computers which has somewhat neutered what I'm capable of doing today. I'm now sorta getting back into learning these things but it's kinda hard when it is limited to weekends and holidays. I hope RPI keeps going with their vision as a publicly traded company. Kids need to learn these things.