how are they stifling imagination? You can still get a compiler and text editor like always. Those two things were all we had back in "the good old days" of so-called general computing.
A few examples from my own childhood. Some freedoms were good and some are bad, but my mom said they were all worth it for what I learned:
· My dad made a custom boot script that gave me instant access to my favorite games.
· I sent a computer to the repair shop for weeks after figuring out how to change the computer to use an unsupported screen resolution.
· My Palm Pilot had several video game emulators.
· Our Windows 95 computer got the Ripper virus from my friend's 3.1 machine. It replicates if you boot the machine with an infected floppy disk connected, but it doesn't affect 3.1, so he had no idea his was infected.
