I remember doing something similar with Bull, a now obscure but once somewhat formidable mainframe and UNIX company.

I had a DPX/20, which was for that model just a rebadged Microchannel IBM RS/6000. I was 12 and trying to figure out how to use it. I knew what I was in for, that I needed to load AIX, but the "firmware" on these are bare bones and you don't have much to go on once it passes off control if you don't know if your console is working in the first place.

Given what I now know, they were surprisingly kind and passed the call around until landing it with an old timer that was familiar with the model and somewhat bemused that I had it and was trying to use it but didn't really know how to help me remotely.

Eventually someone on Usenet clued me in that I needed more pins on my serial cable connected, and it all turned out to be a nice learning opportunity building the GNU toolchain and AMP stack on it.

There was some serendipity years later when I moved back to Phoenix after school and joined a newly formed PostgreSQL user group. Bull was trying to pivot into that open DB market and still had a huge campus in Phoenix where they held the meetings. It seemed sparsely occupied and the writing was on the wall that was all going away (it eventually did a handful of years ago), but I was still a bit wide eyed now having some notion of the campus's historical significance as Honeywell, in the Multics project, and other things. And that my naive call from back then was almost certainly answered in that facility not that far from where I was struggling.

Groupe Bull? I remember them. I wonder how we can give kids today that same sense of wonder and joy of tinkering we had. I guess today's equivalent would involve robotics, since personal computers are all played out.