> Game Genie was likely the primary contributor of exposing kids to computer science in the 90's/00's
I"d say the internet and creating webpages with javascript probably had a slightly bigger impact on young programmers at the time, by maybe 3 orders of magnitude.
Qbasic and nibbles/gorilla was around at the start of the 90s, but the proposal was 90s/00s which is basically the time period of the internet pre mobile phone.
No, late 90's and very early 00's were almost devoid of JS and it was anecdoctical. It was Flash and some ActiveX malware, if not both.
And NPAPI/IE plugins for video players and such.
No, not even in late 90's. Emulators for GB/GBA (sometimes MSX/ZX/C64...) and PSX/N64 did far, far more than JS.
When you could play for free games for the N64 (which weighted just a few MB's, good enough to get them from cybercafés in CD-ROM and play THPS2 at home), you have to be good to at least understand what the graphics mode did to emulators, the filters, the audio quality on CPU usage, and sometimes even hex-editing some ROM headers to enforce compatibility with some emulators.
And, a bit later, in early 00's, compiling them for GNU/Linux for performance and patching some of them to understand odd bootleg NES cartridge mappers.
I said computer science specifically: for web development in the 00's, Neopets was by far the biggest contributor for exposing kids to the power of the internet, but that was more limited to HTML.
I"d say the internet and creating webpages with javascript probably had a slightly bigger impact on young programmers at the time, by maybe 3 orders of magnitude.