I disagree that kids these days are spoiled by large platforms. I've been a member of the TI graphing calculator programming community for nearly ten years now

I disagree that kids these days are spoiled by large platforms. I've been a member of the TI graphing calculator programming community for nearly ten years now, and some of the people I work with are probably the best assembly hackers you'll ever meet. We have two main platforms we work with: the z80 series (TI-73/81/82/83/85/86 numbered calculators) and the 68k series calculators (TI-89/92 numbered calculators). Z80-based calculators run on the fabled z80 processor, the very same 8-bit ZiLOG processor from 1976 with 64k of address space that ran inside the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. People have written car racing simulators (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/391/39185.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/391/39185.html), and run assembly code in otherwise inaccessible platforms using buffer overruns they had to type in by hand (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145220.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145220.h...). We factored all of TI's operating system signing keys, something you may have heard of (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909990 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909990). Some other people reverse-engineered an undocumented USB controller and wrote a nearly complete USB stack for it, including support for flash drives (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/13/139/139572.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/13/139/139572.h...). These devices have a BASIC variant installed on them, which gives students a taste of what it's like to see your work running quickly. I first learned to program on a graphing calculator; it's great to start out because you can write code and run it right away on the school bus. The community doesn't move incredibly fast, as it's fairly small. But walk into any high school in America, and you'll find someone playing Breakout on their TI-83+. Somewhere in that high school there's going to be someone, perhaps one in a hundred, who has written a BASIC program. A fraction of these will want to learn how to write assembly programs, because they want a first-person shooter on their calculator (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/143/143227.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/143/143227.h...). And then they'll wind up shoving PAL out the linkport of the thing (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/143/143122.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/143/143122.h...). Disclosures: I'm a ticalc.org staff member. Many of these people are my friends. I was one of the people TI sent a DMCA notice to about the signing keys. Right now I'm working on a calculator-hosted calculator emulator (http://github.com/chronomex/680 http://github.com/chronomex/680).