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Back in the mid 90s I was teaching myself QBasic and basic electronics. Realizing I could combine the two via the parallel port on our PC was a magical epiphany that I'll never again experience. Being able to "pull" programs into the physical world blew my 14 year old mind.

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The modern equivalent to that experience is through cheap microcontroller development boards.

I recommend the RISC-V based ones (e.g. ESP32-C6, CH32V, GD32V, K210).

Some SBCs double as development boards, with huge GPIOs capable of a lot besides basic I/O (PWM, I2C, SPI, UART, I2S...)

The new, RISC-V based, "VisionFive 2" is a lot of fun.

Our modern PC's have a surprising lack of human scale IO. It's all usb, pcie, sata. Nice enough interfaces but very hard to work with from first principles. If you are lucky you will still find an exposed gpio or serial header.

Most boards have the serial port in a header. It is the same pinout that I/O cards in old PCs in the 1980s used for extra ports. Careful that they are at RS232 levels, not TTL. It is a shame that it isn't directly exposed in the backplate.

The control lines can be abused as GPIOs, but I would not recommend doing so.

Many USB to TTL UART chips do also expose GPIO functionality, if you want somewhat direct access to GPIOs.

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