Quote: "there are a lot of old time geezers around here full of knowledge & tales of how it was better in the old days"
Nononono, kids these days have it much better. When I was a wee lad, we had to code in assembler if wanting to do anything more complex than 'Hello World'. We had no IDEs or fancy debuggers. Memory was measured in kilobytes, and you'd be lucky to have double-digits of them. Think spinning hard-disks are slow? Try loading and saving using audio-casette tape!!! Also, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways!