Interestingly, when I was growing up my dad was involved with the "explorer" program of the BSA. They had an "explorer post" which was similar to a scout troop except that it was focused on all things computer/electronic (explorers could focus on whatever trades they wanted--there were a lot of fire and police explorer posts). It sounds really similar to what this is all about.
A couple examples of the cool stuff they did:
In the late 70s before cable TV, an over-the-air pay TV service launched called "OnTV" [1]. The Post got together the night it came out and had the NTSC scrambling (think analog DRM) broken in a couple hours, with the scouts going home with their own descramblers.
They pooled money and ought a bunch of bootleg Apple II circuit boards and put together their own computers. I was lucky enough to participate in that.
Other alumni went on to do interesting things [2].
A couple examples of the cool stuff they did:
In the late 70s before cable TV, an over-the-air pay TV service launched called "OnTV" [1]. The Post got together the night it came out and had the NTSC scrambling (think analog DRM) broken in a couple hours, with the scouts going home with their own descramblers.
They pooled money and ought a bunch of bootleg Apple II circuit boards and put together their own computers. I was lucky enough to participate in that.
Other alumni went on to do interesting things [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontv
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rose_Bowl#Scoreboard_pran...