The good old days! After using edlin to write BASIC on my parents' 80286, we got a Pentium with a modem, and I used it to download Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and an assembler. Both downloads, I started before I went to bed and they were done by morning. (So as not to tie up the phone line during daytime.) Rbinter wasy my guide to causing a whole new world of exciting crashy behavior. Ultimately I wrote a paint program in assembly before I gave in and started using high level languages like C.
And kids these days, they just don't understand!