Comment by retrac

The benefits/downsides of the modern user experience. Way back in the day, your odds of successfully using a computer were terribly low, without getting entangled in-depth in the technical details of how the computer worked. Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! All common experiences in the 1980s and 1990s. If you did anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) it was basically unavoidable that you learned at least a bit about fairly low-level aspects of the machine you were using. Of course the fact that nothing worked well enough you had to do that was frustrating, but it probably also taught some useful skills and intuitions.