Lol, eerily similar experience, late 80s in eastern Europe. My dad had a 286 for work. I saw him start t a weird version of space invaders in possibly COBOL of all places. So when he was at work I had to figure out how to navigate to right folder, load up what I guess must've been like an online interpreter environment, load up the program, and execute it. But oh the satisfaction! The pride! The feeling of conquering the machine and puzzle! Following that I was on space quest rails more than king quest but what an experience - even if it were on black and white Hercules graphics. Being in east Europe all games were pirated. No manual, no details, foreign language. Playing mean streets without knowing the coordinates for places. And eventually spending first hour of dune 2 terrified of my trike falling off the island into the space chasm... Which turned out to be fog of war not a hole :)
I do think Kids These Days (tm) are being done a disservice by how opaquely polished computing environments have become. It's hard to learn about what is going on when everything is abstracted away and the guardrails work so hard to keep you inside the walled garden.
It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.
Good innocent exciting times!