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 😂

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 15 hours ago

:D great fam

[–] SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] moonshadow@slrpnk.net 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I'm old enough you have to replace "cracking neighbors wifi" with cloning our modem and "youtube" with funny pictures from irc homies, but same. Working around internet access restrictions was a milestone between fun things I could do with computers and how they really worked

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

What’s the modem clone about?

[–] moonshadow@slrpnk.net 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

They would unplug our isp provided modem and take it to bed with them, so I tracked down another one from the manufacturer and copied the eeprom from theirs onto it. It was a simpler time :p

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 14 hours ago

lol!!

[–] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 16 hours ago

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).

[–] cravl@slrpnk.net 8 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] chocrates@piefed.world 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I got old 😭

I got in after pcs were consumer devices but before the Internet (mostly because I was rural).