> But even that was a non-trivial endeavor in those days. You couldn’t just click or touch an icon on the screen to launch the game; you had to use command-line.

I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging? I remember using DOS when I was in grade 3 (7-8 yrs old) and being able to easily navigate around the primitive computer that was at my moms house most of the week, while using windows 95 at my dads on weekends.

I remember learning to type `help` and running the various commands that appeared with trial/error as an enjoyable experience, not one that was intimidating. And I wasn't a particularly precocious kid, my nerd-dom was late blooming.

I actually found it made me want to explore the depths of the computer more than Windows 95 where I would mostly just click the Doom icon and maybe tinker around with creating a few briefcase folders (which I only just learned the functionality of recently :P).