My eldest is getting interested in PCs and building his own desktop system.
Cool.
I did that around his age and it was a lot of fun.
A thing I did was I acquired many old systems from people (e.g. hard rubbish) and cobbled together my own little LAN of 286/386/486 systems running Linux. It forced learning in both hardware and OS/software and was a lot of fun.
I was thinking we could do something similar.
I’m scouting gumtree and facebook marketplace for 10-20 y/o systems for free/or less than $20 that we can start playing with.
To start with, I was thinking we can get a desktop working, then dismantle it completely, reassemble it, install winxp or fedora and learn the basics of what everything is/does and how to load an os and get it on the lan and play some network quake or something.
After that, maybe try and upgrade the video/ram/hdd/cpu/something and see what happens. Pure learning exercise.
My aim is to keep the budget as close to zero as possible, which seems doable. I wonder if there are old pc donation places around I can talk to.