Hearing about the technology from the people who built it, is amazing, and it's an opportunity we won't have much longer in the case of these original systems. The guy who built the first computer game (Space War), and helped restore the PDP/1 on which it runs, presented it on a couple of the occasions when I went there. They have docents that can tell you, with deep personal experience, about the Cray supercomputer, the PDP/1, PDP/8, UNIX, IBM mainframes, etc. But, they're all getting up there in age, and many of the founders of our field have passed away in the past couple of decades.
As for being spoonfed, I don't believe that's true. The depth of knowledge required to truly innovate is much higher than ever. Making the early steps of learning about technology easier doesn't make working with the vastly more complex systems any easier. I feel overwhelmed pretty much every day, when I try to stay ahead of the curve in my field and try to stay at least abreast of what's happening in other fields. Things are moving faster than ever, and it's always going to require being at the front edge of that to actually innovate.
The people building the future today don't have it any easier than the people who built the future we're living in now.
That's not to say we shouldn't teach kids about what came before. I believe the Computer History Museum is really important in that regard. This is the most amazing time in history to be alive, and it's because of the things a few hundred people built 30-50 years ago. I just watched the American Experience film on Silicon Valley (which chronicles the earliest days of the integrated circuit). It's really incredible how far we've come in such a short time. Seeing people who are still alive today telling the stories of the inventions that have re-shaped our entire world in unbelievable ways is inspiring and intimidating.
I concur. I was in college during the 90's and the changes just in the five years I was there was pretty amazing. Several of my EEE roommates were tried and true hackers, cyberpunks and phreakers. The stuff they showed me just blew me away.
So many incredible things happened in the 90's. In just three years, I went from using BBS's, to scanning newsgroups on distant colleges and downloading entire research papers, to seeing the internet in full bloom. It never occurred to me at the time how fast things were changing, or how so many of us were standing at the threshold of a brave new world.
You're not getting old and crotchety, you want the same thing I do. For people to recognize our contributions to what is now completely taken for granted. Even hearing stories from my Dad, I have to tell myself, "And you have to remember, there was no internet, no Google back in the 60's, information got around in a totally different manner." And those stories seem all the more fantastic when you take it into account. To a degree, it's the same with our generation, we saw how information flowed before, and then after the Internet.
I do often get saudade about those times. Such an amazing amazing few decades, and went by so fast.