Sounds like gatekeeping to me. Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real world and of little practicable use, yet. It was a c

Sounds like gatekeeping to me. Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real world and of little practicable use, yet. It was a closed eco system in the 70s-90s. You either had to steal or be rich to get access to a machine. Yes, real steel from the likes of DEC, IBM, ICL et al were magic. The early days of networked OSs equally wonderful. But. Now, with an ESP I can have a battery powered, wirelessly networked computer to do pretty much anything I want, for $10 and power budget of 100ma. If you want to see where low lever hacking has gone, look at the micro-controllers. They are literally taking over the world, run by no small part, by keen amateurs.