> But I guess there was some gap where this wasn't a given any more... Very much so. First computer has MS-DOS 5. Which boots and gives a blinking cursor to

> But I guess there was some gap where this wasn't a given any more... Very much so. First computer has MS-DOS 5. Which boots and gives a blinking cursor to 'do something' with. This often entailed editing mem.sys and various .bat files to get a game working. Or the abstraction that was Word Perfect that was not WYSIWYG that content and layout are separate concepts, and yes, magazines usually had 10-50 pages of BASIC stuff to do 'cool stuff' with. From my observation, the change happened with Windows. Not was was a GUI, things apart from batsock mainly 'just worked' (except when they didn't) and it was no longer necessary to be required to peer into the (albeit high level) bones of a computer. And this was true before DOS, C64, Spectrum also offered somewhat hands-on experiences. But... perhaps not so obviously in Windows-land, if I were giving a kid a computer I'd make sure it was Linux as the command line's not far away, and encourage use of it to get an implicit understanding of what's happening - again a somewhat higher level understanding than creating a RISC-V chip, but more-so than 'right click on the desktop to change wallpaper' - use mkdir to create a directory, understand repositories and how everything's a human-readable text file. Basic stuff with GNU tools, then a little scripting, perhaps some Python.