The average user didn't have "to mess much" with that in DOSland either. Most of that is just false memory.

IRQ settings? Pffft. Cards came factory-configured to a default that was then detected by the setup routine of any game coded in a merely competent enough fashion. And you were free to change the jumper config on the card... which obviously meant you had to change it accordingly in a game's (or application's) setup config. It's all in the manual. Et cetera.

That indeed teached you at least a modicum of working basic literacy of how some of the systems in your computer worked. Back then, I never heard PC people bitching about these trivialities. That came much later, often in form of lamentations of still bitter Amiga nerdlingers, confused "retro" gamers, or (other) computer illiterates.

Windows 3.x did not cohabitate well with certain games that required nearly the entire 640k of conventional memory to run. These are mainly games from the old DOS days; games that relied on DPMI were largely exempt. But to play certain Sierra titles, for instance, you had to set up one CONFIG.SYS configuration that loaded HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for Windows and another that left them out to free up that memory for your games. In later versions of DOS you could set up a menu to select the appropriate configuration at boot.

And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.

Yeah same. I remember playing a bunch of Sierra games on my first PC as a kid on either. Most I had to deal with was installing the drivers for my SoundBlaster card from the included disk. Most I dealt with was putting in the CD, double clicking the installer and entering the product key.

That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.

Anecdotally, I think it depends on age and family more than anything. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, games because we couldn't afford anything new. Started with win98 and games from the mid 90s, but running them in 2002.

I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...

If you wanted to play a PC game in the Windows 3 era, you were playing a DOS game. Playing it inside of windows just made it even more difficult.

Also, the quote didn't really apply in the 80s. Getting a game running on a C64, Spectrum, Amiga, ST or Apple II didn't involve understanding the computer.

That autoexec crap was unique to DOS PCs. DOS was a uniquely crappy experience in a lot of different ways.