When I was growing up computers were dumb and hard. To be a kid using a computer you not only needed to develop the smarts to be able to USE the damn thing, but to make use of it you needed to spend a lot of time...reading. As I got older things like iCQ and IRC were popular and generally you simply met other like-minded people and could generally get by on anonymity. Communities were far better, there was no such thing and "doing it for the <social media platform>". It was hard to melt your brain on albinoblacksheep or newgrounds because content wasn't released on a millisecond basis. You could realistically binge on these similar to kids today and be stuck waiting weeks to months before the next round of brain melting content came out. Don't get me wrong I played plenty of video games on the computer. However, I had to figure out how to even do that to get started. Moreover, we didn't have always-on internet. You called in and put a stupid phone on a machine. Then modems came out. Good luck binging on anything when your mom needed the phone to gossip with her friends. I suppose this is no different than any technical field. Once things are made easy enough a caveman can do it, the next generation loses the creativity and ingenuity their fore-bearers had.

Now, screen time is implied to be negative. As it should be. Your average kid's screen time is not sitting at a terminal trying to puzzle out how to make a computer work. They are not sitting watching 8 hours of programming videos, or math videos, or Carl Sagan's cosmos. They aren't listening to audiobooks of war and peace. They are, quite literally, melting their brain with the videographic equivalent of cocaine. I am of the opinion parents these days who allow their kids unrestricted time on TikTok/Facebook/Youtube/etc are doing them a major developmental disservice. The entire social media machine is powered by designed-in-a-laboratory techniques to keep you locked in. If an adult, with all their life experience, cannot resist such temptations expecting a child to do the same is non-sensical. It's gotten far too easy to not only use a computer, but to become hopelessly addicted to content farms via the "always-on" new world. Kids just aren't being kids anymore.

Times were different back then. Some people may disagree, but the "nerd" kids 30 years ago were smarter, faster, and better than such kids today. No different than our grandparents having to be the same way back when. They had to be. Now, things are easier. For better or worse. The same technology that could've raised the new generation to be even better than us was instead co-opted by advertisers to hopelessly addict children and adults to what amounts to just a different form of pornography (which, coincidentally was ALSO harder for us to get...I digress). I guess this is more of a thesis on the state of the world than just computers...it's all related.