> Eben Upton, one of the creators of the Raspberry Pi,
    > shared with us the brilliant insight that many young
    > people used to have to “choose not to program” when
    > they turned their computers on, in order to play games

What a quote. I remember this. My family had an Amstrad CPC 464, and when you booted it up, this is what it said:

     Amstrad 128k Microcomputer (v3)
     
     © 1985 Amstrad Computer Electronics plc
                and Locomotive Software Ltd.
     
     BASIC 1.1
     
     Ready

The very next thing that appeared was the text cursor, the assumption being that you would now begin to type code. You could choose not to program by putting a game cassette in the drive, holding Shift+Enter, and pressing play. But by default, you were programming.

I love that the Pi attempts to revive this for today's kids. At the moment I think the closest they come to anything resembling code is if they use Firefox or Chrome and accidentally stumble into the developer tools.