[xattt]

It was the accessibility. You were learning computing concepts from scratch, that would then increase in complexity in real-time as your learning caught up if you were actively engaged.

[muyuu]

also the importance and the degree of care that was put into things that were published, and what all the constraints meant also in computing itself

there were strong positives to that, and they just cannot be replicated in a society of hyper-abundance and slop