Thinking about the OA, your student, and the people who don't know how to find | character and about what people tinker with now. OA refers to more experienced

Thinking about the OA, your student, and the people who don't know how to find | character and about what people tinker with now. OA refers to more experienced programmers forgetting that they typed programs from computer magazines and soaked up the basics that way - that is a specific point in history wasn't it, the early 1980s with BASIC listings to type and try to save on the cassette. I'm older and did BASIC exercises line by line on a teletype connected via an accoustic coupler and a modem (19" rack with dial on the front) to a remote mainframe. And yes, we got line noise sometimes. And we learned about the need for exactness. Have we reached a point in history where the machines are so shiny there is no way in? Should we give people recycled laptops with a command line linux install and suggest that they have to assemble their own UI out of bits and pieces of old school window managers? A prize for the most way out desktop?