It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could to a degree back in those days.

I left my system administration position in the 2010s because it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes. Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I remembered. Fine by me

Exactly, it really did feel like the wild west, and in the best way. All the sites were quirky and personal, not a company in sight. It really felt amazing to discover someone's little personalized corner on every single site.

I moved away from SysAdmin around 2010 and I worked with a fair amount of other techies and it really was the wild west in the stuff various people did with: sizeable production systems, Firewall rules (or lack of) network connectivity/ switches, and code changes

Get a cool tool from a magazine? yep just throw it on to production servers - no testing or letting people know what the hell they did (I got burnt a few times from people doing this!)

no change control, no documentation - just reverse the changes, if it doesn't work immediately - although some people never even made back ups of the previous files - crazy shit

Most satisfying is to leverage computers as part of another job like engineering or management or whatever, where you are able to get creative and hack something together under your own control. Then you can use them as you please and they are strictly positive. Actual IT specialists get all the non fun jobs that are deep inside the machine.