My boys love 1986 computing

But these computers were simple enough to "mess with" and get a mental model of the whole. By the time I was 7-8, I started "experimenting" with pulling chips out of sockets (to my parents horror) and seeing what happened if I put them in different places (...). If you even could have done that on modern machines with almost everything surface mounted, you'd fry stuff. With those old machines that was usually fairly hard. Amazingly, I never burned out any chips that way. The simplicity encouraged meddling with things in a way that is harder to see younger kids do with most modern computers:

PCs are outright dangerous to let a young child dismantle on their own - whether or not you disconnect power (I'm afraid my C64's were more than once opened up while connected..); machines like the Raspberry Pi are simple and safe enough, but there's nothing to do inside them. Likewise for tablets and smart phones: If you manage to disconnect the display without breaking anything, you're pretty much at the limits.

If you try to break into the black box as a child, you're faced with an image of something that is way beyond your comprehension.

The C64 and similar home computers, on the other hand, had clearly labelled diagrams in their manuals that even a child could understand. You'd open it up, and you'd see what the different things were, and you could tinker (at least if you didn't tell your parents) and see the effects.

It seems like it is harder to become "independent": Children learn a few "magic incantations" to get to the familiar things, and the knowledge required to bridge the gaps where exploration yields results that encourage further exploration seems higher. Or maybe that's what it looked like to our parents too.

A few years older, I soldered wires straight onto the pins of the CPU of my Amiga. You could make a "pause" switch and reset button easily that way - you could solder it onto the bus exposed on the left hand side of the A500's too, but I had a hard drive attached there.

Speaking of hard drives, considering the article mentions demonstrating floppy drives with the cover off, of course I did that with my 1541 drive for the C64 (and test what happened when moving the IO chips between the 1541 and the C64 - they're "almost" the same model; enough so that the C64 at least will run; same for the one from the Amiga - their differences are small enough to be inconsequential for most programs), but also with my first (20MB) hard drive out of necessity: I bought it used, and within 6 months it started having problems starting up. The solution? Open it up, and give the motor a helping hand spinning up the platter - after that it worked fine. The drive survived another two years I think after that.

One of the things that I think may be going on here is that exploration now feels daunting. It's hard to get excited about getting things to print "hello world" when in another windows are bright colored animated characters engaging in absurd hijinks. However, being able to create one's own absurd hijinks may just help rekindle that spark.

For us that have already been spoiled by modern computing, we need to be shown what useful stuff that we can do by learning about computers (obviously we would need to be on a relatively open modern computer). If most people are satisfied with whatever gets them through the more-or-less intuitive GUIs that lets them watch some videos, do they really need to know more? Well yes, when their computer eventually starts behaving strangely and simply restarting it doesn't help... but that kind of frustrating troubleshooting doesn't leave a good taste in many people's mouth when it comes to having to deal with computers.

If they are already used to modern, powerful computing, chances are that they won't be impressed by the usual computer wizardry that programmers are impressed by. Simply because they don't need, or don't see the utility in, shuffling a bunch of text around efficiently. Instead of becoming a wiz at retro computing - which might be in part because you need to be a wiz, simply because it is more primitive - what can we impress people with on modern computers that they can't do themselves easily (and would like to do)? They've already been spoiled by modern computing - for many, there is no turning back.

If the only real allure of being a computer whiz - to most people, anyway - is to be able to operate arcane technology, then the value proposition simply isn't there for people that do not appreciate computing in itself (and even that might be an acquired taste, so sort of a catch 22). It's like a classical guitar virtuoso who can be motivated to learn songs and pieces solely for the technical challenge they pose, while his students just want to gain the skills necessary to learn their favourite band's songs, or the songs that they've written themselves.

Power off --> remove drive --> Sharply tap the drive on desk --> replace drive + add new drive --> clone

The look on customer faces at the "Sharply tap the drive on desk" stage was as priceless as the data on the hard drive B)