I'm probably the same age as you (started in 1982 on a Philips P2000) and feel the same. What wrecks me every time is the thought how many new things we discovered and did in a timespan of just a few years back then (the lifespan of various home computer models). Today, 10 years pass and all we really get is somewhat faster CPUs, slightly bigger memory, better graphics. And it's not worth it to discover any specific tricks for any platform (like you could on home computers to get more colors / bigger screen etc.).
5 ) I don't agree, i still find so much exitement today with what is going on around, sure we have so much more power, but there is still challenge today, i'll admit not the same, but still a lot of challenges.
I created a series[1] (pardon the plug) to make the software I had wanted to have when I started: simple, understandable, frugal, almost elegant.
Maybe, it will bring some nostalgia back!
Dragon, Oric, Commodore, Amstrad, Sinclair and BBC.
I already had a Sinclair ZX81.
The article really captured the exploration and discovery of that era.
On a more amusing note, my mate wrote a utility which we put on a floppy disc. We would go to shops and boot it, and it would copy all the roms. Good times.
I have fond memories of this computer. I absolutely loved its keyboard.
The problem is that the manual contained only the set of instructions, without any explanation. My Aha! was understanding how it worked.
I did write a couple of games on Oric/Atmos, but quickly changed to Atari ST (I had one of the first 520ST with its developer manual).
There were many publications like that, and often they would contain broken code. I sometimes wondered if it was on purpose, but that was actually a great opportunity to go beyond just typing the code and run the program, having to understand the code, and debug it.
We had Input magazine, the Capital's newspaper computer section on Friday, Crash and from our neighbors Microhobby, which helped to improve my Spanish as well. :)
What I remember from these early times:
1) we had only one television at home, so typing programs required to have access to the TV. This is why I spend a lot of time analyzing programs BEFORE typing them, since I didn't have a lot of time to type them. This probably taught me a lot !
2) I always wanted to improve the programs I typed, so I spent a lot of time optimizing them. This also proved useful later ;-)
3) Some programs included mysterious hexadecimal characters. I tried to find some documentation about that. It was difficult, because the information was scarce, and there was no Internet. One day, I got an Aha!, and I discovered 6502 that day. This was useful, since I did write quite a lot of games in 6502, and it got me my first job in the game industry in 1985.
4) In France, there was a beautiful newspaper called Hebdogiciel. It contained programs for all kinds of computers. I tried to convert these programs to my computer, and this also gave me pointers to handle conversion between Basics. My first job was about converting Basic programs between various computers (Thomson TO7 <> Exelvision).
5) everything was so new and exciting ! Nowadays, I don't feel this kind of excitement. Everything is so easy to put in place. At the time, we only had 48 to 64 kilobytes of memory. Everything was a challenge. The computers were not designed to write games, but games were doable.