For the past year or so, a couple teen boys from my neighborhood come by on sunday afternoon for a couple hours of programming in python. I started very simply and built up with text based tasks, then showed them pygame.

I am thinking about showing them what is under the hood, that python itself is just a program. When I learned to program it was the late 70s, and trs-80s and apple-IIs were easy to understand at the machine code level.

I could recapitulate that experience for them, via an emulator, but that again just feels like an abstraction. I want them to have the bare-metal experience. But x86 is such a sprawling, complicated instruction set that it is very intimidating. Of course I'd stick to a simplified subset of the instructions, but even then, it seems like a lot more work to make output running on a PC vs on the old 8-bit machines where you write to a specific location and it shows up on the screen.