I would love to read this kind of article along with all the drawings and pictures of a similar kit for the NES, from the 1980's

A lot of those early programmers knew electronics they just built their own stuff. Crazy compared to your average developer now. A lot of guys had to build their own terminals/keyboard etc back then (especially the 70's computer clubs). At some point the hardware and software kind of split up (lucky for us that didn't have any real hardware knowledge)