I too started using computers at a young age and loved them and even got my own Nintendo when I was young. I feel very conflicted about the current anti screen fad. My son is very young and my wife doesn’t want him to use screens at all.
I don’t want him to use tik tok or facebook but maybe I will buy an apple 2 or setup a rpi emulator and play little old school games that weren’t available online.
We're currently at this stage with out kids, too.
I think the staunch "no screen" mentality is a broad-stroke lever that non-technical thought leaders in the child wellness space have stuck to, and I understand where they come from.
Though, as someone who owes his livelihood to being able to tinker and experiment with technology as a child, I'm looking toward a more measured approach. I may very well set up an airgapped Linux box (Windows has come a long way since the XP days, and gone entirely the wrong way) and let my kids proverbially "have at it" - this way, they can't get stuck in big tech's psycho-loops or sucked into YouTube's colourful dopamine machine - which I think, is the entire drive behind "no screens".
I think well-measured exposure is imperative.
We set up a “kid laptop” for our kids (ages 3, 6 and 9) that has a short list of allowed websites and a curated set of installed programs.
We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to share it between the three of them, so there’s a natural limit there.
Every so often we’ll add something new; most recently I installed SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.
So far we’ve been very happy with this approach!
i went the same road, and have great results. No mobile. Every night, read books with the kids. Video Game in the weekend, only 2D games, like Mario 3. Worked great for us. Now they are teenagers, doing well in sports and school, have always a book with them, and no social media.