>You seem to toss out the history of computers. I owned my first computer when I was in high school, I soldered it together from a kit (it was based on a Z80). Today I can do the same thing with an ARM chip (in fact I've been playing with the ST micro STM324F 'butterfly' which is a Cortex-M4 architecture.

My point being, I doubt that this was your first encounter with programming a computer, and even if it was, you are in the extreme minority, even on HN.

>You also toss out with the bathwater virtual machines. You can boot a virtual machine where the hypervisor is 'signed' on a machine which gives you 100% access to your virtual machine that can do most anything you might want, from talking to the network, to displaying graphics, to running the latest fizzbuzz contender.

Ah, where is this VM i can run on an unrooted ipad?