It's all fun and games until you break the very expensive family computer (and when your parents have written instructions for the sequence of magic commands to run various programs and don't understand the directory tree, "breaking" it can mean a lot of things) and have to figure out how to fix it. With no Google to consult. :-)
Directory tree? I had a cassette player. This is a computer that you upgrade the OS by going to a computer show and buying a new ROM. Dad watched just to make sure I didn't electrocute myself. He drove me 50 miles buy a debugger on another ROM chip for my 14th birthday. My parents thought these new fangled computers might be important someday, and bought me one to "play" with. I didn't have Google, but I had the instruction manual for the 6502. Life was good.
