Tilda Moose, citizen on Nostr: Good point, still true. I built my own pretty useless BASIC computer in 1981 (ZX80) ...

Good point, still true. I built my own pretty useless BASIC computer in 1981 (ZX80) which gave me a deep dive into nontrivial electronic assembly and learning an imperative mode language. Then by 1989 I was in college and the classroom was full of 386's running only what the floppy drive allowed, incl DOS. It felt shrink wrapped to death. The more recent success of eg. the Raspberry Pi at getting young people interested in programming from scratch again, is notable however. :)