I suspect there's a lot of survivor bias in your informal survey. Across all brands, tens of millions of 8-bit systems were sold in the early 80s. The number of

I suspect there's a lot of survivor bias in your informal survey. Across all brands, tens of millions of 8-bit systems were sold in the early 80s. The number of users who became engineers is maybe 10% of that - at most. I think it's impossible to reproduce that experience exactly today, because any modern attempt has to compete with many other sources of digital distraction. Minecraft and Roblox probably come closest. (And do a decent job in modern terms.) I suspect psychological, emotional, and digital content literacy - understanding how games and media manipulate beliefs and influence behaviour - is much more important than coding skill today.