It came with a spiral bound manual that taught GW-Basic. I didn't learn a damn thing at the time, I just slowly typed the lines of code into the PC. I stuck at it long enough that I eventually drew a star on the monitor, as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" beeped at me its 8 bit glory
In that singular moment, I hadn't "learned" anything, but I knew then, I needed to take apart every single piece of electronics I could get my hands on. I never "learned" anything about schematics or what all of these pieces of metal do, yet I remained endlessly fascinated.
30 years later, I do embedded development. There's not a day that goes by when I "learn" anything. But the sheer joy of my continued failures, along with the rare, occasional success, has made me a very happy person, who backed into somehow figuring out how to read schematics, prototype a proof of concept, layout PCBs, order the parts from digikey, order boards from Dirty PCBs, solder them on to the PCB, program Assembly, C, Python, JS.
But when it comes to the folks that can do devops, thats just plain magic.
Basically, whenever I look at a schematic, I think “why do analog engineers like to work in the equivalent of assembly language?”
I do more digital than analog electronics, and based on Verilog and VHDL, those folks seem to be working with “stone knives and bear skins” too! At least they get to have real names for things.
Not being at all a professional electronic engineer, I’m sure this a misguided reaction, but I’m not sure exactly how.