If anything, I would think that modern computers make it _harder_ to understand what's actually going on. I learned programming on a Commodore 64 - if you wanted to print a character on the screen, you wrote ("poked") a byte into a fixed memory address. If you wanted to read a character from the keyboard, you read ("peeked") a byte from a different fixed memory address. Being so close to the machine helped build an intuition about what was going on behind the scenes, so concepts like garbage collection and virtual memory made a lot more sense when I got around to learning them.