this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Which was used in home computers, just not in the west
I agree with you, though. I'm kind of the prime market for this from an educational standpoint. My oldest kid has just learned to read and write (kind of). She's fascinated by computers. She's only played retrogames (happily) thus far, so she wouldn't be put off by the 8-bit era's graphics or sound.
But even so...what would I be hoping to teach her with this? How to work around the quirks of the 6502 that are not applicable to literally anything else? That life is full of unnecessary obstacles and frustration? That she could have learned more interesting programming in an easier way if I'd got her a computer with a flat memory model? I'm kind of meh on it.
Exactly. Something in the spirit of an Amiga 500 (I never had one, so this is not nostalgia speaking) is much more suitable to beginning programmers. Something with a flat address space, an easily memorisable instruction set and rich collection of hardware (blitter, DMA controller, sound generator) to play with. And something that has modern interfaces (HDMI & USB) so the not-so-well-equipped hacker-in-training can also jump in right away.
The Commander X16 isn’t it.