There have been a lot of things I grew up with as a kid that I always assumed would just be forgotten, as most things are. I didn't have access to many fancy games or hardware in the 90s, so a lot of my early computer memories are of playing ZZT on my parent's ancient (even then) PC with a monochrome amber display. It's really something to see that it evolved into a whole subculture of quick-and-dirty game dev for teens, and that THAT in turn is now also history and is being preserved and passed on. Computers advance so quickly, and the assumption is often that the new thing will completely replace the old. But sometimes, the old still has a place, even many years on.

" If you remember hostile teenagers dedicating an unhealthy amount of their time to harassment, never letting mistakes be forgotten, or screaming slurs, those days are long past." Mixed feelings on that, though I get what the author's going for. My experience of the "early" web (95-02 or so) was definitely that it was often "toxic," to use an obnoxious modern term, but it was also wonderfully free and honest. When another teenager hurled slurs at you, he wasn't doing it to up his social cred in some perverse way, or advance some twisted economic or political agenda. He just genuinely thought you were a piece of shit (or usually something much less polite).

The weakness of teenagers is that they tend to be overly emotional, dramatic, and short-sighted. But as I've gotten older, it's become clear that the weakness of adults is that they're about 90% suit and tie. Everyone is so obsessed with maintaining their image that there's almost no space to be an actual human being anymore, and the cancer that is social media has magnified this a hundredfold. Frankly, I think I prefer the teenagers. At least they had an excuse.