I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom)

I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-scale design space. Machines of lower capability are mostly toys or needlessly painful, but an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz with 64KB of RAM is enough to provided a very nice text-only computing experience. You can run self-hosting development tools (Turbo Pascal!), get access to all kinds of CLI tools, real file systems, etc, while still keeping the entire memory map in your head. I love the idea of a computing environment that just provides you with a thousand fully-independent, 64KB 8-bit machines and just drops time-slicing and task switching completely.