This is so close to my heart. I first wrote programs in BASIC on a TRS-80 at the local Tandy store in 1978. I bought my own in 1979, then got frustrated with

This is so close to my heart. I first wrote programs in BASIC on a TRS-80 at the local Tandy store in 1978. I bought my own in 1979, then got frustrated with how slow it was. I hacked the machine, smashed the stack, wrote a Z80 command line interface, and then wrote a compiler for a limited subset of BASIC. (Hand-built recursive descent. I was planning to write a peep-hole optimiser (it desperately needed one) but never got the time). Then I got my first "freelance" programming "contract" to write some stock prediction code. I still didn't have a clue, but my second project - still in 1979 - was a restaurant layout and waiter allocation program. It used what I now know to be simulated annealing to find good (not optimal) layouts for the restaurant given the sizes of parties that were book. All in 16K RAM on a 1.77 MHz Z80 processor. Why not write a simulator for a simple machine that goes into a full-screen window and emulate the simplistic language and graphics of the time? Most kids would blow it off with scorn and go back to their play-stations or whatever, but some would love it. Which ones would become programmers? Shouldn't we encourage them? Kids need sandboxes in which to build sand-castles and let their imaginations run wild. Can we build one for them?