Computer manufacturers of today could still take some of those lessons from the C64. It was a computer for true programming beginners that started you right in a BASIC interpreter. Yet it scaled with the user’s expertise, all the way up to machine language programming and hardware hacking. If you mess something up you could soft or even hard reset to the prompt in under a second. What computer today can do this?
I had high hopes for the Raspberry Pi but in its default configuration, you still have to wait while booting an operating system, provide storage, figure out your hierarchical file system and shell commands, and do on. The Pi should ship by default with a ROM that drops you into Python or something 250ms after you power on.
Commander X16 by The 8-Bit Guy may possibly count: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommanderX16/
(C64-like board, also based on 6502, with as much of C64 as possible with more of less off-the-shelf hardware while keeping costs as low as possible)
I had high hopes for the Raspberry Pi but in its default configuration, you still have to wait while booting an operating system, provide storage, figure out your hierarchical file system and shell commands, and do on. The Pi should ship by default with a ROM that drops you into Python or something 250ms after you power on.