I'm not arguing consumer computing is bad. I think it is great, and you are right, it is inevitable. I'm more talking about how Windows of the 95 - 2008 period

I'm not arguing consumer computing is bad. I think it is great, and you are right, it is inevitable. I'm more talking about how Windows of the 95 - 2008 period didn't ship with development tools (which were also behind non-student paywalls), terrible sysadmin tools, and nothing pointing a user of any Windows computer towards hacking on it. It was presented as a washing machine (mainly MS-office or MS-IE box) when it can do a lot more than wash clothes (general purpose software). There is a generation where a lot of potential techies were lost to their day to day compute platforms not having easily accessable or discoverable development platforms the way a c64 or Mac2 would have had (included, by necessity). I started on dos, which was one of the major learning points for me - as soon as Windows adopted a gui, you never experience the actual terminal of a computer anymore. Great for the consumer of a tool, terrible for a generation of unknowing would be hackers lost to a black box technology.