My operating system teacher was a hardcore Linux zealot and "M$" hater. But one day he praised Microsoft for Active Directory and group policies. Comparable, well integrated easy to use solutions didn't exist at the time. (mid 2000s). Batch scripts were lame though...
Yes! The next generation of computer scientists will be more passionate than we are because they have mastered their craft and got curious despite growing up with dumbed down boring computers.
"NCommander" on YouTube could probably be a good starting point to get a feel for what is required and to ask some questions. Features very interesting/insane archaeology builds like bootstrapping Linux from Scratch on WinXP SFU which ships with an incomplete toolchain from 1993 (?). 8)
I am really grateful for this effort! Because of it ancient gems like z0r.de can continue to exist.
z0r had a profound influence on my younger self by introducing the art form of looping way before it was widely understood (Snapchat, TikTok) and combined it with a heavy dose of dadaism.
In an interview I can't find anymore a developer from Farbrausch said that they used such a method to optimize the .kkrieger demo and ended up having a bug in the main menu because while recording the coverage the user never scrolled to a certain main menu item. So once you scrolled there you couldn't scroll up anymore.