Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?

Your childhood interest in 80s computing is like the golden era of MMOs. Now there are bigger and "greater" things and the entire thing just seems poor and pointless now. You can't go back and recreate it, because the context is now different. It would be pure re-enactment. Back then it was the best thing about, if you didn't have an arcade near you then it was probably even the most powerful videogames machine you had access to. Now, there is always the knowledge that you will never make something as cool as what the big companies can make.

I don't know if there's any abstraction as wonderful as the disk->file abstraction that has enabled most modern computing.

Perhaps though the current frontier is the software->application abstraction that can be explored through public git repositories and Github "Topics".

Of course the application for this set would mirror the popular brain drains, short-form content production, video game mods/cheats/piracy, deep fakes and pranks, etc.

Just as the OS and operation of a few commercial packages you had access to in the 80s seemed limitless, so is the landscape of FOSS packages.

Here: https://github.com/topics/gtav

Factorio, but for kids...

This is a great answer. I think you already hint at this but I wanted to elaborate on it a bit: the big thing that our kids fall in love with will not necessarily be computing (at least not in the sense that we mean), and that's okay.

We grew up at various stages of a massive revolution—some are reminiscing for the 80s, I'm at the tail end reminiscing for the early web and then the Flash era. Computers were wonderful to me because I could, as a kid, produce results that looked and felt like they were in the same ballpark as what I saw professionals doing. It was the frontier, and I felt like I was helping to explore it.

In the last two decades computing has grown up, and having grown up it's no longer possible for children to participate in the frontier. From a young age they interact primarily with toys and tools that would be impossible for any one of us to make alone, much less for a child who's still learning. Sandboxes like Scratch are great, but an adventurous kid who wants to be at the frontier will very quickly recognize it as just that: a sandbox. It's not as compelling because it's artificial, created specifically for their education.

Instead, I expect that my children will find something else, a new frontier to push. My kids don't want toys curated by their parents, they want to explore the world and they want to contribute. They are going to find the fields that are still fresh, that still have mystery, that don't require years of education to get to the point where they can contribute meaningfully. And that's awesome! I'm excited to see what they find, and excited for them to show me along.

My wife's siblings are all musicians because that's the direction their mom drove, but nearly all of them now wish that they'd been allowed to pursue what they were truly interested in. If given a choice, only one of six would have chosen music as the primary thing in their life.

Seeing that, my feeling isn't so much that parents as the driving force doesn't work, it's that it's cruel. Our kids are not blank slates for us to write on, they have many predispositions and interests that we have only the smallest influence over. It is far more effective and more ethical for us to help them develop those interests in ways that will benefit them over the long haul than to try to teach them the things that interest us.