I enjoyed reading this, thank you for sharing. When you say you tried to contact the admin of the box and that this was common back then, how would you typically find the contact info for an arbitrary client's admin?
I have no feedback that hasn't already been mentioned elsewhere. I just want to say that I love this. Your son is developing a passion for programming very similar to how I did so at his age. Seeing it happen as an adult is fascinating and brings back memories. Also, both your challenge tasks and instruction about resources (Google and AI) were spot on and seemed well heeded. Lots to be proud of here :)
Do you know of anywhere I could learn more about this? Googling "old sparky" just yields articles about electric chairs, even when including keywords such as "rheostat" and "theatre"