I was tearing in to TV's at age 6 and fixing them at age 8, by age 12 I had a soldering iron and a bag of junk. All I needed was power and a table and chair.
I would take Bets. $20 I can fix it, or it's free. people would line up. Anything in they would put in front of me, electronic/electrical . I'd get a minute to examine it , and tell them what parts , or fix it with what I brought. A literal Felix the Cat, with a bag of tricks.
I would oddly just know what I needed for that days adventures.
Anyhow people would literally gather and take bets. In the most lucrative neighborhoods. I'd be brought in to untangle a companies phone system and reprogram their PBX, or some industrial controller. Anything Dangerous AC power I'd bring my dad in . But I got to fix computers. So I wrote a data based on the TRS-80 model 3 for the North Jersey Buick Dealers association. I be sitting in the showroom writing code. Before you know it I am helping write the Arc file compressor, with a guy who was teaching me about Unix and compression. Building radio equipment and all sorts of stuff.
