I remember coding in BASIC on a TRS-80, smashing the stack to get to machine code[0], writing my own monitor program and assembler, then a compiler in BASIC from BASIC direct to Z80.
The story of Mel[1] is real, and I really do think people should have the opportunity to see how things were, and recognise that things now are AMAZING !!!
[0] Not even assembler
Everyone's a kid to someone else. I remember being told some stories when my beard was already white and genuinely wondering if they were true or not just because my personal experience had stories that were just as crazy for someone just 10 years younger.
That's why programmers often like to call themselves wizards. We do things that are even unimaginable to other people. I recently got a surprised "Wow, is that even possible?" comment about a weekend project made for fun.
Technology is complicated and only getting more so. Even a tech savvy person can be surprised by something new in tech. Some techniques that can be used to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped system could still sound crazy or leave you surprised. But it's a different kind of surprise, not that you can't believe it's real, more that you can't believe someone thought of using it that way, or that tech evolved to the point the thing became possible.
I was thinking more of stories like this one [0]. Sounded exactly like a story used to bamboozle young'uns until I realized it's actually true. Stories from behind the iron curtain told to people from the other side of it sometimes sound equally crazy even without the generation gap. A cultural/societal gap is enough.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
An anecdote I love is a young scholar asking his teacher:
Before you had internet, how did you access Wikipedia?
And remember when they enabled the ability to save those podcasts so you could listen to them offline? Game changer.