[dchichkov]

I think it was easier at that time to get a good, pretty complete picture of underlying hardware and software. A kid could do that. Many of us did :-P. It was an incomplete picture, because it was not including, say, algorithms used in BIOS/OS. Or, say physics of the underlying semiconductor technology. But from the engineering standpoint, yes. It was a full picture. Think this way, a complete IBM PC manual was a very readable, pretty thin book which included a complete description of 8086 processor, hardware and APIs (BIOS). And K&R was another pretty thin book, which gave enough to start hacking away and get you pretty close to the point when you could develop code that is genuinely useful to someone! And with that comes an opportunity to start actually selling that genuinely useful software (and hardware).

I think now, it is maybe easier to get started writing something, but it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to get the complete picture. Many components are designed using technologies that require PhD level understanding - basically being current with modern research in computer science. And that comes with a very heavy baggage of scientific notation and ability to work with research papers. Definitely not approachable by 8-year-olds :-/ And I'm not sure if one just can be a good engineer without having that kind of understanding of underlying technologies. Sorry kids :(