Sometimes I come across an idea that today’s computers are too complicated, and it’s difficult to understand them. People think that it was a lot easier in the 80s during the 8-Bit computer era to grasp all of what is going on inside of any single machine, because the computers were relatively simple and constrained.
I think it’s a controversial question. In the 80s, the computers were easier, but it was more difficult to find the information about them. There was no modern Internet with Google, StackOverflow and Open Source, so the computer enthusiasts spent a lot of time to understand relatively basic things. Today, there are a lot of possibilities to understand how computers work. There are books like Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition or university courses like MIT Operating Systems Engineering OCW course. Also, it’s possible to start your research with RISC-V microcontrollers that are a lot easier than X86 CPU.
I know a lot of developers who do not have enough time or desire to explore internal mechanisms of the frameworks and libraries they use every day and very few people even try to read the documentation and the source code to go deeper. The same was during 80s: people just learn some basic commands to start the game from ZX Spectrum cassette, but they did not understand how these commands actually worked. If someone really wants to understand the computer’s internal mechanisms, it’s possible to do. The only required thing is a desire to learn.