Same with Himself. We never had a new computer (unless you count our Atari 800) until 2000 because he would bring home the old ones from work for free, tinker with them, and get them to run good enough for home. I felt like the IT guy's version of the shoemaker's kids.
Back in the early '70s he worked for a small company designing systems and writing code. (His typing wasn't very good - I have a punch card he did for me that says "I move you"
) A client wanted to get their desktop computers to send data to an office in another state, but back then only mainframes were doing data transfers. He and a coworker (Tom) stayed late every night trying to get it to work. It was a secret project and I couldn't tell anyone so I called it "Nanette" anytime we were out (theatre joke). Got so I saw so little of him I would pack a basket of food for him and Tom and run over to the office from my parents' home and drop it off! When they finally got it working by testing between their office in Cleveland and the home office back in MA (different company than the most recent) everyone at HQ was so impressed they offered the two guys teaching jobs at corporate. Dodged the moving bullet that time.