I agree that it's hard to replicate the early experience of a truly personal computer. There is Commander X16 which does create such an environment for the time

I agree that it's hard to replicate the early experience of a truly personal computer. There is Commander X16 which does create such an environment for the times[0]. I also learned on 8-bit computers with BASIC then machine/assembly language learning hardware peeks/pokes and more graphics/sound programming. My biggest take-away was the feeling that you could learn and understand everything with some documentation, friends, and patience. [I never did sort out the problem with my interrupt-driven multi-tasker from not understanding re-entrancy until much much later.] At the same time, I think the best way to teach new programmers is more abstractly away from the hardware ways of doing things. In particular, don't follow the von Neumann style of mutable variables and procedural code. Instead I would suggest functional languages like F# where we have input, function, output. Then building a program is composing pipelines of transformations through functions, using error collecting types like Result/Either. [0] https://commanderx16.com/ https://commanderx16.com/