A Raspberry Pi is cheap, but I would hardly call modern ARMv7 Cortex chips simple. Neither of the 8080 and Z80 chips were considered as 'simple' for that era.

A Raspberry Pi is cheap, but I would hardly call modern ARMv7 Cortex chips simple. Neither of the 8080 and Z80 chips were considered as 'simple' for that era. And they were so horribly expensive (say about $800 bucks in today's money) that we were paranoid about zapping them with static electricity. There were several projects using only standard TTL chips and making a usable computer, but they quickly were displaced by the 'CPU on a chip' when the 8080, Z80, 6800, 6502, 2650 and a bunch of other chips all came out. Eventually the wide selection was whittled down to pretty much just the 6502 (Apple) and the Z80 (The main bunch). http://www.ljw.me.uk/educ8/ http://www.ljw.me.uk/educ8/ I suppose a good question is: What do you want to do with it? Do you want to learn programming principles? Do you want to learn programming a particular CPU? Do you want to learn programming in machine language (assembly language) or a higher-level language (C, Java, Rust, Python)? Do you have an embedded computer/hardware combo in mind? And many other questions like those. And of course, most of those 40-year-old CPUs are still available to play with, anyway. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KAjZbjPqnA&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KAjZbjPqnA&feature=youtu.be