A coworker asked the question: "What do I show my eight-year-old son on the computer that'll get him interested in it?"

After talking for about 20 minutes about old computer games, I didn't really have a great answer. My coworker was looking for something to instill the fascination with computers that he has in order to show his son that computers are amazing tools, and that they're worth spending time on.

The difficult part of the question is the age bracket. According to him, his son at eight has almost zero attention span for certain things, however, his son can play Pokemon for hours on end. Whatever did manage to hook him in would have to be age-appropriate, simple enough to not require a steep learning curve, and in-depth enough to hold one's interest.

What drove my interest initially was, of course, computer games. Being pretty proficient with computers to start, I would usually have most of the time in elementary school computer lab to play games like Dinopark Tycoon or Oregon Trail. However, games at school paled in comparison to ones I was able to play at home: the Lucasarts Adventure games, the Space Quests, King's Quests. Things that I could play for hours, but probably wouldn't hold my interest as a kid today, given the popularity and technological advances of modern games.

However, when I was eight, I would still stop playing computer games after a while and go back to playing with Legos. Which leads me to think that the key here is creativity, not just entertainment.

What I mean:

• I remember spending a lot of time playing with 3D Movie Maker, playing with scripts and sounds and 3D characters that I could control on the screen. I wish I still had the files around to see what I came up with, but they are, alas, lost to time.
• I remember creating a simple GIF animation that slowly unblurred the letters "Josh's Game Page," and then blurred them again. I remember this taking hours upon hours.
• I remember recording and playing with friend's voices with the Windows sound wave recorder.

Before the Internet, what were you guys doing with computers that kept you interested and/or creating with a computer?

(I also ask this because my memory of this period of time is hazy, in that I started learning HTML a little after sixth grade, and then it was 2007 and I had a degree in computer science)