90% or more of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation" (which to me is anchored around 1985, give or take a couple of years, and Commodore 64) were

90% or more of computer users during the "Home Computer Generation" (which to me is anchored around 1985, give or take a couple of years, and Commodore 64) were no more computer savvy than smartphone users are now. They wanted to play games. The computer had no OS to mess up. Loading up a game from disk did not require significant computer skills and if something went wrong, you just turned it off and back on and tried again. Maybe a tiny little bit of dabbling in BASIC along the lines of the print-over-and-over loop or a type-in program from a magazine. But computer savvy? Hardly. The main difference, as far as I am concerned: The <10% that were geeky enough to actually program these computers, or crack video games, or draw cool pictures using graphics software, whatever, that contributed something to the scene, had a ready mainstream audience. Lots of other people had the same machine and and were eager for new stuff to run on it. And things were simple enough that you could write an interesting-to-neurotypicals video game in BASIC in one day (in my case, a cute little platform jumper game that I saw on someone's VIC20, and even though we had much better ones on the C64, it just had this odd, primitive charm - so I made my own version). These days, the geeks do stuff that is largely only interesting to other geeks. Which is fine, the internet ensures that even this limited audience is huge. But the 90% that aren't geeks now aren't exposed to geek culture at all, not even as armchair dabblers or watchers. And use their magic pixel slates.