Love everything you wrote, my man.
Sounds like your childhood was a lot like mine. Replace Atari 800 with Commodore 64, but otherwise I was the same on both ends, playing on computer and taking things apart to learn how they worked like my grandpa's radios, and riding my bike for hours outside until it got dark and the streetlights came on. Good times.
I hear you about the lack of connection to nature and the other problems brought on by technology these days. I love getting away from it all, either camping or just taking a walk. It always heals my mind and makes me feel better.
I never had the Commodore 64, but I did trade some kid something (can't remember what) for a Commodore Plus/4. I was really used to Atari BASIC so I never really mastered the Commodore flavor, but I did play with it quite a bit. Those were really fun times as far as computers are concerned. It was all so magical for me at the time. I really had no idea how limited these machines were!
Using BASIC on those old things, that brings back memories. I remember when I learned at school go to fill the screen with my name and that seemed like such witchcraft. Do you remember those old computer magazines that had three or four pages of nothing but BASIC code at the end to type in? It was usually something silly like a simple game. I'd spend hours trying to type them in.
Oh yeah! That is actually how I learned to write code. They would have the same program in various flavors of BASIC.
Actually, the way it finally started to click for me what the commands were doing was when I was at school where they had a TRS-80 and a stack of PC Computing magazines. There was a particular program that I wanted to write, but it was only available in Apple BASIC.
So line by line I looked through the TRS-80 manual and managed to translate the differences. It took me like a week. (The teachers were scared of the computer, but let me use it all I wanted, since no one else would touch it)
I was amazed when the program actually ran, but not impressed when I saw how lame the actual game was. Lol! At least I learned something, though.