You know, DOS is still there and you can bang directly in the metal inside a virtual machine. But nowadays you can do this even way better in Arduino/RaspberryPi, having even more hardware exposed. Sure, the road is a bit longer, but also the power rush you get from seeing your little nifty cobbled together wires that, once coupled with a serial->usb converter, your fiddling with switches will do on the screen, is very intoxicating.