[alibarber]

This sounds almost exactly like my first taste of computing with my dad; 8 low voltage fillament bulbs (and some buffering) wired to the parallel port, along with some simple code to count in binary. Sure, I was a kid and more excited just to have flashing lights, but in my more studious moments I did learn so much about binary, how things are represented in computers, programming, interfaces etc etc.

[galangalalgol]

It seems like all of our modern abstraction layers have lead to a dirth of tinkerers on the edge between metal and software. There isn't any easy gpio on your standard Chromebook or desktop for instance. Yeah you can get a usb to gpio or make one. But being able to sit down at any computer and do something low level was nice.

[eurasiantiger]

On the contrary, any device which has DDC support and a VGA, DVI or HDMI output will have an i2c pin in the connector. Even DP carries i2c in its aux channel. https://hackaday.com/2014/06/18/i2c-from-your-vga-port/

[galangalalgol]

that is a cool hack, but its just using i2c to talk to an atmega and have it do the gpio. You could just as well use the atmega from usb. Or an esp over wifi.