I can relate. I feel very, very lucky that my early programming experience was on a Commodore 128. Instant-on, straight to the REPL. And being able to switch

I can relate. I feel very, very lucky that my early programming experience was on a Commodore 128. Instant-on, straight to the REPL. And being able to switch between C=64 mode & C=128 mode made me aware of how differences in hardware and language changed how you approached a problem, and how CP/M was something else entirely. It really was the perfect intersection of complicated enough to be a fun system to explore, and you could do Real Projects with it, and simple enough that you could 'hold the whole machine in your head'. I still remember how proud I was when I figured out how to write a TSR driver for a mouse cursor using the tape buffer for storage so that I could move a sprite around with a joystick at the same time as being able to use the shell. At the time, it felt like magic.