My experience being born in 1992 is that as a kid I could toy with QBasic for instance (and then with Dev-C++ a bit later) ; as well as go peek & change stuff in random files (hello red alert save files :D) - can't really do that with an iPad.

I was a QBasic kid as well, but I think it was pretty clear to me even at the time that QBasic was a mickey mouse environment. You couldn't get into 32-bit mode, or dynamically allocate memory with pointers, much less blt sprites or backgrounds around at a usable speed.

I'm not saying it's exactly equivalent, but there's certainly a perspective which could argue that a) the free JavaScript interpreter available on every device is more featureful and interesting than anything available to us 80s and 90s kids, b) low-cost SBCs running free open source operating systems and compilers are more accessible and better supported than the commercial compilers that few could have accessed back then, and c) the overall ramp from curious/creative gamer kid to capable hacker is much smoother now than it was then, with a lot of interim options between JavaScript and commercial environments in which to gain comfort and achieve interesting results (thinking stuff like GameMaker and RPGMaker, modding communities for existing games, hacking/homebrew/porting communities for consoles, etc).

I get the argument that many kids are growing up today without necessarily touching a "real" computer, just a tablet. That said, as someone who got into PCs quite early on, I'm a bit skeptical that the world we live in today where you can assemble a working computer based on a Raspberry Pi with loads of open source software for probably about $100 somehow is less accessible to a kid who wants to hack around on computers.

I think the key with the Pi is that it needs to find its way into the house for some other reason than just to be an educational aid. Positioned that way it will be about as interesting to most kids as a plate of cold spaghetti— am thinking here of the book I was given as a teenager on developing ActiveX components, because it was an enterprise-y thing, when what I really wanted was a book on DirectX, for making games.

But yeah, if the Pi shows up as part of an IOT system, or as a TV/streaming box, or to play retro games on, or whatever, then it's there and it's available to be tinkered with; and from my limited experience, basically none of those use cases will run on their own without at least a little bit of tinkering. :) Even my little Linux-running Powkiddy emulation handheld has probably consumed about as much of my tinkering time as it has my retro gaming time.

Right. So quite a bit later than the period I'm talking about. Late 90s/2000s period is arguably when commonly-used hardware was most accessible/hackable.