Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you.

We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed.

My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere.

I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.

> Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays.

As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.

> Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together.

There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.

> Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle").

The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.

I don’t know about your experience, but I grew up during the same time period. Tech was decidedly uncool, at least among my classmates. I don’t think tech became cool until the early 2000s when smartphones took off (specifically the combination of smarthphones and social media/communication). Now these things are so common place that I think they have ceased to be cool. It’s like considering a rotary or push button phone to be cool in the 1980s.

I might be wrong but it sounds like what excited you was seeing the progress of the tools, not necessarily what YOU can do with the tools. If that's the case then yeah, it's probably getting harder to put your hands on tools that are orders of magnitude greater than what you just had. I'm learning guitar, all the tools I can get are all very exciting because I haven't seen them before, and I could acquire them a lot faster than I can improve my abilities. But if I don't put in the time to advance myself along with the tools they will quickly become "boring", but only because I'm not able to use them effectively.

> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago"

In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before.

TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.