I meant it as more of an expression. Poorly behaving adults are still "some people's children"
I had a similar time with phone systems, dial up systems and the like. It was a lot of fun back in the naive innocent times. My father worked for Bell for 30 years, and so we had multiple lines, computers with killer modems, it was a great childhood.
I sometimes pity young people coming up. They have access to fantastic technology that works very well. Almost gone are the days where a user of a machine must also be the maintainer of the machine. If a kid wanted to play video games 20-30 years ago, he had to know how to fix stuff.
I think this is leading to a reversal to that assumption that kids are good with technology. I see tons of teenage kids of my clients now who wouldn't know what to do with a console screen if their lives depended on it. All they know, is their iPhone and iPad work fine. Some of them don't even have an x86 computer of any kind.
I certainly don't condone hacking for malicious purposes, but today it's would certainly be fun to grab a pringles can, get a high end WiFi card, and packet inject till you crack into random SSIDs. Then using their printer to suggest that WEP is not safe, and to have a nice day!