My early days included building my Heathkit H-8 computer from bits, designing and building custom boards and writing devices drivers for the new hardware. The Radio Shack Color Computer gave me an excuse to wrangle my 6809 assembler skills. Doing a screen dump to a color printer using the Radio Shack BASIC utility took 20 minutes. My assembly language version dumped in 2 seconds. The slow place in the chain was the physical printer. When my PC motherboards get "orphaned" by Windows, I put Linux on them. The device drivers have "caught up" by then. I have had motherboards that lost Ethernet driver support from Linux. That required going back to the chip manufacturer and recreating a Linux kernel device driver. Failing that, a USB to Ethernet adapter is a fair rescue. It helps to have experience writing device drivers for operating systems against hardware. That has been a mainstay of my career. Most of the serious work can be done with little more than a vt100 serial terminal. I do enjoy a fine environment like Visual Studio Code, but it is just driving a Lamborghini vs a VW Bug. Both get you to your destination.
My early days included building my Heathkit H-8 computer from bits, designing and building custom boards and writing devices drivers for the new hardware. You were definitely further along than I was during that era. But, I have purchased and put together quite a few electronics kits over the years. Before that I loved books by Alfred P. Morgan which were mostly published before the electronics age. I put together quite a few interesting electrical projects from his books.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Boy_Electrician/6tYyAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover
Most of the kits I put together required soldering components onto a pcb, a couple were from Heathkit. But my first “digital” kit was given to me by a teacher when I was in the 5th grade and required no soldering. Unfortunately, I have had multiple head injuries in my life so I am having a hard time remembering the specifics, but I believe that it's highlights were some type of crude IC chip and an LED array that could form a digit.
My parents gave me a "64 in 1" kit about the same time where the components were attached to a piece of cardboard and you could assemble a radio, a siren, a metal detector, and a bunch of other interesting little tidbits by wiring from one spring to another. I went through them pretty fast so they bought me a "200 in 1" kit and then a better “digital” kit that what my teacher had given me.
Of course after that I began collecting electronic "breadboards" and components to experiment with which could be easily pulled back apart and repurposed when I lost interest in a project.
I was able to play a very little bit with computers owned by friends in the early days of "home computers", but the first actual computer that I purchased was a Texas Instruments TI/994A home computer when they went on sale at Kmart one Christmas.
I can’t tell you how many days I spent typing in programs from books and magazines and saving them to cassette tapes for that TI-99/4A. I of course spent a lot of time working on what I thought at the time were important programs in TI-Basic and Extended Basic.
Of course, I ditched the TI and bought a Commodore 64 when they became available with a disk drive for a reasonable price. But I still have a TI expansion box that originally cost a small fortune. And then I ditched the Commodore 64 after I put together my first IBM PC Compatible computer. But fear not... I have always had a lot of storage space, so I still have a huge collection of vintage hardware.