It's always been difficult to discover this stuff. There has always been a very small subset of people who were driven to figure it out, in part at least, becau

It's always been difficult to discover this stuff. There has always been a very small subset of people who were driven to figure it out, in part at least, because it was hard. To reiterate what ChuckMcM said at the top of this thread. The "hackers" who would figure that stuff out are still there still doing things no one expected could be done systems that no one thought would be used in those ways. We didn't actually lose anything. It's just a little obscured by the sea of consumers of computing who aren't hacking on those systems. The filters that kept the consumer away from computing are mostly gone but that didn't make the consumer magically become interested in tinkering with those systems.