Maybe the main difference for me, as a 1970s-80s kid, was that I taught myself some small bits of assembly language programming.

I feel very fortunate to have come along at a time where home computers were simple enough to understand.

The circuits were literally black boxes, so no doubt the real old-timers would chuckle at this assertion: they had to build the computers out of discrete electrical components, one transistor at a time... But I could understand a CPU that had a single register, an "accumulator"...