I too have the same feeling. For me it was Turbo C and later Redhat Linux with its manual and website dump of text files of machine internals for learning to bo

I too have the same feeling. For me it was Turbo C and later Redhat Linux with its manual and website dump of text files of machine internals for learning to boot up things and program hardware. Now it is a complete mess of APIs and frameworks with the core hidden deep. It gets so hard to start anything due to this and the interest evaporates very fast.