Gingerbread started the iconic tradition of hidden "Easter Eggs" in the settings menu. If you repeatedly tapped the Android version in settings, it revealed a hand-painted image of a Zombie Gingerbread Man standing next to a green Android robot. Gingerbread - Android Developers

It is a bad OS by modern standards. No dark mode. No permissions manager. Battery life measured in hours, not days. But it had a soul. It was small enough to understand. A curious teenager could decompile it. And in theory—just in theory—you could boot it from a disc.