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> No, give me a new "hobbyist" computer in the spirit of those days. Throw an ARM m-series/RISC-V/etc on it with some custom blitter/vdpu and sound ASICs and 512MB of RAM. Give it some easily accessible programming environment on ROM, with an option to baremetal with ASM, C, etc. Add a few slots that are MMAPed in. And let the hobbyist field run wild.

Isn't a pi awfully close to that, at least in spirit? For my 10 year-old's science project, I bought a trio of interesting sensors off amazon, showed her a diagram of the GPIO pins and a diagram of the sensor pins, explained how to map between the two, and had her draw it out with colored pencils.

Then I burned a fresh raspbian image onto a sd card, connected a keyboard, mouse, and tv, and helped her figure out how to read the GPIO pins in python. The vibe of the whole thing felt a lot like the old things we had in the 80s and early 90s, but more accessible because I didn't have to deal with weird serial/parallel junk or with putting together a PCB for the slots.

It does sound like this crew harbors ambitions of moving past nostalgia to embracing that spirit a little more, but I don't personally feel like that's lacking in the Pi ecosystem, at least...

It’s similar on the hobbyist interest side, sure. But generally gathers more from the hardware hobbyists than software. This is because the Broadcom SoC is somewhat awful to do bare metal on (mostly due to anything beyond a framebuffer being mostly locked off), so you’re limited to using Linux for full capabilities.

Nothing wrong with that, but definitely a different environment than something like BASIC as your bootrom, or direct hardware poking you’d get from the old hobbyist machines.

> The vibe of the whole thing felt a lot like the old things we had in the 80s and early 90s

Except back then you were doing all the discovering and figuring stuff out without any help from your parents. At least that's the way it was in my circle of friends. When a 10-year-old is able to do everything you did without any assistance from an adult, then we'll have the spirit of the Commodore 64.

I appreciate that. I would add that she might be able to do everything I did (with my 8-bit micro when I was 10) with the pi I set her up with. The thing I was impressed with about the pi was how little I had to help her interface with sensors that touched the real world, like light sensors and temperature sensors. The GPIO there is much more accessible to her than the user port on the C64 or the expansion slots on the Apples were to me.

I had to help find the references and explain some of them to her, but I've been pleased with how little help it's required from me. Probably only a little more help than I needed to learn how to connect cables and format a floppy before I ran off on my own as a kid. But she's getting more independence at the end of my help than I got with the hardware of my day.

I have always wanted to learn to build a (relatively modern) computer like the one you described:

- Some 32-bit CPU, whatever, anything that is a bit easy to program through C/ASM, just to make sure there is no weird kirks.

- Support keyboards, displays, mouse, etc., just the usual ones. So a lot of drivers.

- Some 256MB - 512MB memory should be good enough.

- Has an OS, some programming languages, some tools, a good editor, etc.

This is like the Ben Eater 8-bit computer in adrenaline. It is probably a LOT of work just to figure out how to source the correct components, and build the thing, then a LOT more work to write drivers for them, and MORE work to write OS and compilers and tools for them. We can't use Linux because it has memory protection all over the place. We need something that newbies can poke and peek into, and simply reset the CPU if something is wrong, just like the micro computers in the 70s/80s. We DO want capable compilers and interpreters (e.g. C/Python) and good tools (like, some editors that have good auto-complete at least).

It's a bit like building a pad or a mobile phone, but without all those commercial consideration. Nowadays, to build a pad or a mobile phone, if I'm not mistaken, one simply push Android into the chipsets and call it a day, which is not what I want. But what I want probably doesn't make $$ so no one is going to do it.

What is wrong with an raspberry Pi pico?

If you need more ram: https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/ (just ignore the Linux part)

Yeah it works fine if we ignore the Linux part. Guess I might be thinking too much.

> Support keyboards, displays, mouse, etc., just the usual ones. So a lot of drivers.

You wouldn’t even need that if you released it as an all-in-one like the hobbyist machines of yore (C64, speccy, etc). Just give it a relatively decent cherry MX built-in with swappable keyblocks. Add a USB hub for HID devices and include a basic HID driver, and include HDMI.

The hardware is the easy part. But if you want a selection of software such as exists for the C64, that takes a lot more time and of course there’s no guarantee that it will ever come to pass.

If you’re trying to make yourself into a massive company off of it, sure the interest definitely doesn’t exist and you should forget it.

If you look at the amount of interest projects like the openpandora, the retro rereleases, etc get; there’s plenty enough for something to hack around on. You would just have to release it as a side/passion project with modest revenue projections.

That's what I want too. But I fear that even if such a machine existed, the spirit wouldn't be there. Just like no one forms bands or makes personal websites anymore.