Right, yeah i just recall that for a high enough bit of towers the amount of steps needed to solve it rises quickly. The story, "Now Inhale", by Eric Frank Russell, uses 64 discs. Fun story.
Min steps is 2 to the power the number of disks minus 1.
Programming a system that solves it was a programming excersize for me a long time ago. Those are my stronger memories of it
Nostalgia has a lowkey reactionary impulse part(see also why those right wing reactionary gamer streamers who do ten hour reactive criticize a movie streams have their backgrounds filled with consumer nerd media toys (and almost never books)) and fear of change is also a part of conservatism. 'Engineering minds' who think they can solve things, and have a bit more rigid thinking also tend to be attracted to more extremist ideologies (which usually seems to have more rigid rules and lesser exceptions), which also leads back to the problem where people like this are bad at not realizing their minds are not typical (I can easily use a console so everyone else can and should). So it makes sense to me. Not sure if the ui thing is elitism or just a strong desire to create and patrol the borders of an ingroup. (But isnt that just what elitism is?)