Thrilling. I am old but not normally prone to nostalgia. This site gets across the instant gratification one felt with the C64. I started with a Vic20 and soon

Thrilling. I am old but not normally prone to nostalgia. This site gets across the instant gratification one felt with the C64. I started with a Vic20 and soon chafed at the 3.2K (or so) RAM limitation. Obtaining the C64 was a quantum shift. As others have pointed out, the instructional materials were abundant and often good. Tomas Petricek's lovely site is also a model of interactive instruction. When he explains PRINT "HELLO WORLD" he says "To a modern programmer, it is amazing how little it takes to get from booting the machine to printing hello world. " When I wrote my first compiler in the 80s I made sure you could run a program that simple. I am somewhat surprised that only Python and arguably Javascript give you that kind of immediacy. With all the advances in languages it constantly surprises me that there's no universally available language that lets you start out so quickly.