Ditto. Spaniard here, so we have volumes and literal tons of history. But GNU/Linux and using 15yo old software which had years of geekeery and culture such as Emacs in y2k was magical. Code, math puzzles, a chatbot, fortune files, games like nethack (playing slashem and Tome2 was more fun than reading LOTR at 16)...

It was live history working in my hands and in a usable way after Euclid and Newton.

No need to buy hardware and materials to do technical stuff, a computer was enough. And not even a good one. My cwm+tmux setup would still work in a Pentium 2.