nerd cred:
My parents were avid bowlers. My father bowled regularly on two leagues and often subbed on others. So naturally, I bowled from an early age and was on junior leagues myself quite early. This would have been about 1957. No automatic scorekeepers then of course, so I became quite proficient at simple arithmetic. I often 'worked' as a 'paid' scorekeeper for the adult leagues. So in the 4th grade, about 1959, everyone took a special math test. At that level, it was mostly just scorekeeping-type arithmetic, so I could pretty much just look at the problem and write the answer. On my birthday, 1957, Sputnik. Red scare. Was U.S. education falling behind? The math test was to select students for an accelerated math program. I had to change schools and was in that program through high school. (There were no AP-type classes here at the time.) I started college at second-semester calculus. Funny thing was, I was never really that good at math, but a pretty good bowler.
I'm not sure what got me interested in electricity. Probably projects that appeared in 'Boys Life' or scout handbooks or something. I seem to remember making a tic-tac-toe game; just battery, lights, and switches, that you could play against. 'Computers' were something I knew existed - from movies and such, but had never encountered. I made a large diagram of something I wanted to make, something more elaborate than the tic-tac-toe game. But before acting on that I came across a book in the library that I'll never forget: 'Computers: From Sand Table to Electronic Brains'. (A few years ago I found and bought a copy that's here somewhere.) It was a very elementary level, of course, but in the back of the book were the instructions to build a 'real' electronic computer. I studied that book intently and thought that maybe I could build it. I was 12 in 1965, in the seventh grade, and literally had zero contact with anyone who knew anything about electronics. One day, unexpectedly, my mother met me at school and she had that diagram I'd made. She had called the school, asked to see a science teacher, and made an appointment. We met the 8th-grade science teacher, Mr. Naylor, after school and she showed him that diagram and the book and asked him if I was dreaming, silly, or what? My mother, that book, and that teacher literally changed everything.
The 'computer' was actually just a counter, a string of flip-flops, that could count up or down in binary. But remember, this was 1965: no ICs, no LEDs. The only output indicators were incandescent lamps, so to drive them the transistors had to be TO-3 case power transistors. Giant resistors and capacitors and horrible first-time kid soldering. But it worked. I had first built the power supply and one FF only, but dang if it didn't switch on-off as it was supposed to.
The input to this counter was a really slick idea - a telephone dial. What better way to generate a string of 1-to-10 clean pulses? The trouble was (and the author didn't mention) that telephone dials were the closely-held property of Bell Telephone (at the time). They just didn't sell telephone dials. My mother to the rescue again; she found out who to talk to, explained the need, and bought a dial.
With one FF working, I had to add more. Trouble was, those components were really expensive. Just the transistors were $10 each (in 1960's dollars!). So the progress was slow, but I think I eventually had at least six FFs working. So you could flip the switch to add or subtract, enter single digits via the dial, and watch the lights flash as it counted up/down with each pulse from the dial. Nerd light show. (Except 'nerd' wasn't a term then, so all the other kids just thought I was weird.)
Math. Electronics. (And rockets.) And just like that, I was going to be an electrical engineer.