[wmnwmn]

You are right that it was a special and exciting feeling learning these things when these machines were brand new. When my friend's family bought a TRS-80 in 1978, it was like some kind of alien artifact that fell from space; we were utterly fascinated by it even though its capabilities were almost absurdly minimal. It had only 4k RAM and that required several minutes to load from the casette tape storage.

Nevertheless it ran BASIC and my friend and I learned to program on that machine. Subsequently we honed our skills on Apple II's at school, and later by hacking on the PDP-11 at school. In 1981 I built a simple Z-80 computer, roughly equivalent to the TRS-80 (note:"80"). At that time doing something like this literally caused newspaper reporters to come interview you. It was nice to learn these things sort of organically, albeit perhaps not optimally; I've made my living in software development and to this day have never taken any class in programming.

Of course that moment of novelty really was brief. Once the IBM PC came out in 1981, computers proliferated rapidly and they no longer seemed so special. Nevertheless I do think that our "Generation X" had sort of lucky timing with computer culture, since we were also just reaching working age when the Internet revolution hit (my first job out of grad school came from an ad which literally said "the Internet revolution is here and you can be part of it"...a small part to be sure but still part!)

But anyway every time period has its pluses and minuses! If you want to know how it really felt to grow up during that time, the truth is that we envied the 60's generation hugely and thought that everything we had was just kind of a pale imitation of what they did (for example, music). Take a look for example at the book called "Generation X", which is pretty dystopian, and really did express how many people felt. There's always something new happening!