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.