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Motivations are certainly different now. I do wonder if kids today still have that "wild west" feel when messing with computers. I remember when I was young, writing programs and making computers do simple things seemed really impressive to me at the time! The bar is a lot higher now and I wonder if that dissuades some kids from trying because doing something impressive now requires a lot of extra overhead that I didn't have to deal with.

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> I remember when I was young, writing programs and making computers do simple things seemed really impressive to me at the time!

It was same feeling for me too, in the early/mid 80s. And it was impressive also because few other people were even doing it. Whether other people could or not, based on their capabilities, most didn't actually have any home computer to even practice on. Merely having a home computer in, say, 1983, was a rare thing. Actually being able to make it do things you wanted was even rarer. It probably seemed more impressive to many outsiders than it actually was (in the sense that a for-loop is pretty boring/basic) but hard to separate out that impressiveness between having access to the situation at all vs having the skills.

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