I'm not arguing there aren't exceptions, and maybe I should rephrase the time period - I'm talking about kids who never had DOS. They started their computing experiences
on GUIs in Windows 95. I started on dos at around 2 - 3, and I know my personal interest in computing was heavily developed by the need to use a dos terminal for a few years. I know my younger brother, his peers, and pretty much everyone else I grew up with (not many 2 - 3 year olds played on a computer, but I liked playing Wolfenstein at that age) don't know what a terminal is, what code looks like, how to do terminal piping or navigate with terminal commands. Because they never saw it.
I'm also not arguing there aren't exceptions, but my older cousin grew up on the c64 and spent ages 5 - 10 basically hacking on that thing. Tremendous growth experience in his eventual CS education. It went from upper middle class families owning a tinker box for their 5 - 15 year olds to upper middle class families signing kids up for facebook and cell phones before they hit 10.
> Being online and having so easy access to so much information, entertainment, communication etc has generally made people more impatient and less willing to really commit to the kind of single minded focus that is needed to get into and really develop programming knowledge.
I think they are easily distracted. I know I was, I went from scripting nwscript persistent worlds at 12 in NwN to playing wow all the time. I learned some lua there, and tweaked some addons, but I was effectively stuck on my programming experience from 13 - 18, though that was mostly because MMOs were a great escapism from horrible public education settings, and I liked turning my brain off at the time since I never really had a reason to turn it on.
But as soon as I hit my senior year of high school I got my act in gear, mostly because I was tech-savvy from my earliest affiliations with computers, and against what Microsoft wanted me to do with my devices (hacking them). I set up dual boot Ubuntu, learned Python / Java, got my BS, and I've only gone down the rabbit hole since then. I've been soldering recently, run Arch, use terminals all the time, I recently did a cmos reset over 3.3v current on a router.
But that required a spark that only really came from my most developmental years having to interact with computers as tinker boxes rather than colorful graphical click squares, and few of my peers got that experience.