You probably can't go wrong with giving your child resources that's too expensive for other children to be exposed to for some free future competitive advantage (which translates to adult success), as a general first heuristic.

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

To be fair, Gates published one and only CS paper. It was on prefix sorting and shows pretty serious mastery of discrete math for his age or any age. Perhaps the co-author -- legendary algorithms professor Papadimitriou -- honed the proofs but Gates was clearly not a one-trick programming pony.

He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.

And Allen:

Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...

See also Levy: "Inside Bill's Brain Calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Theory":

Inside Bill's Brain lays the Gladwell Theorem to waste. By delving into Gates' very early life, Guggenheim reveals that, basically, Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian. From the instant baby Gates joined his well-off clan, he understood there was a giant impedance mismatch between his cosmic intellect and that of the world. There's an amazing moment when he recounts the time his parents had him take a test to get into an exclusive private school for the sixth grade. He asked himself, did he want to go, figuring that if not, he would purposely blow the test.

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/

You can easily go wrong when you zoom in from abstract resources and find yourself deciding which pieces of hardware they actually could use (almost none of which, it is assumed, you have used yourself.)

You can't really force it and there isn't a formula. I'm just a journeyman software jockey but my brother got into Harvard, Yale, and Stanford even after skipping a year of high school.

I totally agree. But I believe there is a process to explore his interests, pinpoint something, and then spend some money to further it.

You don't need necessarily need to spend much. Of course quality music lessons or gymnastics will consistently cost a bunch but the lion's share of things will not. I know plenty of impressive scientists who were very middle class growing up. Collect coins, stamps, or sports memorabilia. Practice sports statistics and trivia. Go for hikes and catalog leaves, plants, and insect specimens. Grow a garden or vegetable from seed. Learn cooking while teaching the physics and chemistry of it, or focus on the artistic aspects. Explore your local road maps and learn navigation skills. Put a world map on the wall, then throw a dart at a country and grab a book on it from the library. Draw comics or try digital art. Draw dinosaurs. Build PCs from spare parts or try retro computing or vintage electronics. Do online coding for kids. Try robotics kits. Learn how to do bike tune-ups and maintenance, then get old grody bikes from friends and refurbish them. Try a new game monthly like Chess, Go, or Backgammon. And an important one would be to take advantage of local geography and culture. For example, in Illinois and Wisconsin, we can enjoy the geology and ecology of the Great Lakes, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

I agree with you, there are a lot of possibilities. I'm waiting for him to grow up (just 16 months now) and try those things.

My daughter is only a month older and I share your feelings. I'm glad you posted that comment above, I often feel intimidated about admitting how little I truly know about parenting.

Just remain flexible when his interests completely change six months in...

haha very true...