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>I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.

>The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s

>The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab

So, you essentially own your career to your parents being well-off and tech inclined.

It's not like you ended up in that high school by accident.

Sure, being born in such a family is a stroke of luck that many people don't get to have.

I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated.

Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4.

I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today.

I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far.

And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools.

Credit where credit is due, dude.

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A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.
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Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe.

A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away.

With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.

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But making tools tinkerable is incompatible with extracting maximal value from them!
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