Being able to "program your own computer" was important to me.
   Microsoft encouraging it was marvelous. Once they stopped
   encouraging programming it was a sad day. I guess the day QBasic
   support ended is when computers ceased their business/hobby
   status and entered mainstream society. Windows 95 *was* really
   beautiful change from MS-DOS but from that point on, the ability
   to control your own computer became more and more tricky as the
   OS moved ahead. I suppose it was necessary but still, I should
   be able to write 10 lines of code on a simple kid-friendly
   programming language that would give me a rotating cube or
   something. I'd be fine with Python or something - wouldn't have
   to be BASIC, although BASIC really was an easy to learn
   language. Still, times change and kids teach each other to hack
   their favorite games which leads into programming anyway. LUA is
   a very powerful scripting language, popular on Steam and Python
   of course; I feel bad for the kids whose first language hacking
   attempt is JAVA... 'cause JAVA's ... well... yeah, it's JAVA.
   But I think the same enthusiasm that we had is still around in
   the new generations so whatever big co's do to restrict control
   for the users, the users will find ways to get around all of
   that. smile emoticon