I mean, that's fun that your kids can play Minecraft and build in it. But does that teach them anything about technology? Half the fun of having a computer bac

I mean, that's fun that your kids can play Minecraft and build in it. But does that teach them anything about technology? Half the fun of having a computer back in the day was digging through the filesystem, mucking with settings and breaking things... looking at what was on floppy disks and CDROMs (I found Weezer's music video and a Pinball game on the Windows 95 CDROM, it was thrilling). You learned how the computers worked, and that was powerful. It enabled you to do so much more than just play games. You could view source, and suddenly you were a web developer. You could hit up Warez sites and get access to all the professional software that you couldn't afford. 10 year old me now, would have ended up playing with my parents smartphone, then getting sucked into endless feeds of shit, and actually learning nothing. I might have given up. There's no curiosity on the dominant computing platforms because you can't do what you want with them, you can only do what you're allowed to do. A pocket computer could be so powerful, and indeed they do a lot, but they could be so much more than a conduit for middlemen to take your money. Yes I know that ESP32s and Pis and lots of cool experimental things exist. And they are cool. But the initial experience of using a computer back in the day was what sparked my interest. Locked down iPhones and Android tablets let you run Apps. What a discouraging experience that must be.