I completely missed the heyday of microprocessor programming, but I wholeheartedly disagree that hacking on things is harder than it used to be. TI-84 calculators are $100 and let you write Z80 assembly, 68k microprocessors are available for less than $10 from any number of sources, easily available documentation and 30+ years of experience to draw on, freely available plans for whole systems so that you don't actually have to figure anything out yourself, or you can bypass all that and build your own processor in a circuit simulator, like I did, or learn HDL and buy a cheap FPGA and run it for real, or use something like python to control your parallel port with single lines of code connected to a webserver if you don't mind being silly.

Heck, if I want to, I can even massively hack things, write kernel drivers for linux OR windows, do basically whatever I want. Some of them are harder than others, and some are more intended than others, and some require more time than others, but the world of hacking is still one of possibility. Pretty much the only locked down systems are smartphones, which sucks, but I just bought a raspberry Pi zero W for 10 dollars, which is incredible compared to the Basic Stamp 2 micro controller that cost $120 just a decade ago.

Literally the only difficult (at least IMO) thing for hacking whatever you want is analog circuits. I still massively struggle with that.

Good points. When I think of hackability tho, I think about the devices and "toys" that I already have. Back in the day you just hacked on what you already had. Also, most of the time you were a kid or teenager that couldn't even afford the 10 bucks for the pi, so unless your parents bought one, you were out of luck. I had to take apart my dad's VCR and computers and stuff in order to learn.

But for an older person, you make some great points.