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I often think about what you could learn from trying to run games back in the old days. It was a huge motivation to fix some problem to get a game running. Optimizing the memory in ms-dos because the game needed more etc. Most often getting a game was a journey on its own.

Today kids just have 1 gazillion games on their phone. There is no more connection to the system beneath. No work or effort needed. Just download and play the next best thing.

I think this generation is missing out.

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Today's kids also play Roblox, Garry's Mod, Minecraft and Fortnite, all of which allow them to create their own games and tools and write code alongside it, like Verse for Fortnite [0], LUA for Roblox [1], IDK what language it is but there's something for Minecraft bedrock edition [2] and of course the old Java edition, and also LUA for gmod.

This is how thousands, if not millions of people will have their first foray into coding, and it's a much, MUCH larger amount of people that get in touch with the deeper levels of tech than "our" generation had.

Don't underestimate "this generation"; don't generalise them either by trying to state they only spend mindless time on their phone.

[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-pro...

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/scriptap...

This is a good point. If I would have grown up today I would possibly have done other things that aligned with the same kind of interests, and perhaps even have gotten further. Kids these days can, and do, build actual robots and UAVs with onboard processors with more FLOPS than you could even dream of back in the old 75MHz pentium days.

And this is why I setup a mister fpga running an atari st for my 3 years old son's first foray into using his own computer. Eventually, we can also use the 486 core to run ms dos :)

I think old computers have a certain amount of simplicity that I think make the user less passive when using them. I also think that older games tend to be both less addictive and leave more to imagination.

Of course that won't be sustainable forever eventually he'll be influenced by his peers to play whatever they're currently playing but I'm hoping that having been exposed to older computers will be beneficial.

Tinkering with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to squeeze some more Kbs was a challenge, and you learnt a lot about the SO doing that.

I still wonder how we managed to do that just by reading books or manuals and sharing info with friends.

The biggest culprit was the cd-rom drivers and the mouse driver.

Our PC “only” had 4mb of RAM which was the minimum for Doom, but exiting Windows into DOS after boot left a lot of cruft in memory.

The first time I tried starting the computer and bypassing autoexec.bat (which I learned from reading on a BBS) I was scared it was going to be permanent. Luckily it wasn’t.

All I can think about was trying to muck with IRQ conflicts or messed up awful windows 95 drivers later on to get my game working. I'm not sure I miss either of those much but I also switched to Windows NT early and kept an old decked out Pentium 1 for dos games that ntvdm wouldn't play nice with.

Nodding though, oh man that got me into developing things like you wouldn't believe.

Quake 1, 2 had a huge community around coding or map making. Tribes 2 was absolutely all about mods. Command and Conquer with it's rules.ini or StarCraft with its gui scripting stored in map files I spent so many hours messing with. It was all about making something crazy to show off when you went back to school or later to a lan party to wow everyone.

I think about this often. How many youngins with the curiosity / aptitude to get into systems engineering will never know they have the knack?

I concur.

When I was young, my parents bought me a copy of X-Wing (CD-ROM) for our Win95, Pentium 100 machine. My parents were not computer savvy, and being only 13 myself, I didn't know much about computers. My dad couldn't get it to work, and so the box sat on the shelf for months, maybe even a year. (Time's warped when you're a young kid. =P ) I'd leaf through the manual and gaze longingly at the box art, and look through the little technical leaflets that were included. The latter of which may have been written in hieroglyphs. I set it aside, played the Descent demo over and over that came with out PC, and surfed AOL.

I kept learning more about the computer in the meantime.

One day I was performing my old ritual, when I noticed one of the paper leaflets in the box. Rather than being hieroglyphs, I knew now what it was saying. X-Wing needed DOS EMS (Expanded memory), and this paper was telling me I needed to edit CONFIG.SYS on Windows 95 machines to get this to work. My parents had forbid me from touching anything in the "WINDOWS" folder (there be dragons, according to them) and after having wiped a lot of my mom's files on our earlier Tandy, they didn't want me messing with things I didn't understand that they couldn't fix.

But I was confidant. I edited the file, and hoped for the best. The computer restarted, and just as I'd done countless times before to no avail, tried to start up the game.

Listening to the Star Wars theme play MIDI over the speakers, I jumped up, ecstatic. It was late at night, and my parents were watching TV in the living room. I ran downstairs. "I GOT X-WING WORKING!!!!!!"

It was a feeling of accomplishment, that to this day I look back on and say "that's when it started". I think I knew it then, to some tiny degree, that this was going to be my path.

I'm 40 now. I'm a solutions architect at AWS. My computers were all built by me. And my X-Wing box sits on my shelf still.

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I've talked with my niece, and with some other kids over the years about their gaming, experience with PCs, and the like. There's not much to figure out. I don't blame them; I don't shake my fist at these kids. After all, I recall the frustrations too. Building PCs that wouldn't start for no reason (well, this still happens), the unreliability of early home routers. Many early games that just wouldn't start on your PC but run just fine on your buddies. I remember LAN parties with my colleagues with a combined technical know-how in the room of several CCNAs, MCSEs, etc, and we still can't get our Unreal Tournament server to be seen by everyone's PC. Don't get me started on copy protection woes.

But there was a joy in finally getting it working, and through the stress, we learned a lot about how it all worked. The current internet and computer environment doesn't have that in that you need to know how it works in order to enjoy it. I wouldn't reverse the state of affairs; things are much more mature and stable now. And it's not as simple as saying "well go off and do these projects". We can motivate some to do so as a stretch, but nothing was motivating the same way as sheer necessity like we had it.

So I see it as just something to observe and note and appreciate for how we had it then, both maddeningly frustrating yet glorious in how genuine and unrefined it all was. Hopefully later generations will find their own versions of what we experienced.

I'm glad to have lived through it. It kick-started a love of computing and a lifelong career.

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