AI Changed the Industry, But Not Why I Loved Computers

I wrote this because I was drunk and felt nostalgic and also scared for future of my career. There was a time when computers felt magical in a very quiet way. Not because they were smart. Because they were mysterious. Before feeds got loud. Before every skill became a market. Before every hobby got turned into content, a side hustle, or a career path, there was just the machine and your curiosity. A lot of us did not start with code. We started with wonder. We started by clicking things we did not understand. Opening folders we had no business opening. Changing settings just to see what would happen. Installing things we should not have installed. Breaking something, panicking, then fixing it and feeling like a genius for the rest of the night. We learned computers the way kids learn cities: by getting lost in them. There were places inside a computer that felt almost sacred when you were young. Control Panel. BIOS. Device Manager. Registry Editor. Even the names sounded important. Dan