@jingof

then do it... there are lots of people posting something, even promising a great project, and then nothing. Just talk

start and show it. The idea is not special, there was a "kids edition" of a aros distribution years ago. It is basically selecting appropriate software and restricting access, what is difficult on amiga of course. But with a more secure and configurable OS certainly possible. Like Linux propably. Linux also has a bigger software base.

There are some child related games on amiga and also some teaching/learning software. But it is limited.

In my distribution (aros vision) a lot of software is included, that includes also child and learn software. Aminet is there a big resource. Also I am still working to integrate as much computer languages as possible, both interpreter and compiler, so I think if someone wants to learn programming even something amiga based can be useful.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 31-May-2026 at 05:46 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 31-May-2026 at 01:58 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 31-May-2026 at 10:54 AM.

@jingof

Quote:

jingof wrote: > the C-512 is a programmable games console that encourages kids to build games for it, ...

It sound like the reinvention of the Raspberry PI, a small and cheap computer made for Kids learning Python. And we all know Python was meant to be as funny as Monty Python.

Available as low Cost version lt. 20€ or as powerful luxury version in a keyboard case.

Or maybe you meant the Commander X16 a beast of an 8/16-Bit computer with more than 512kB Ram.

Or the Colour Maximite another beast of a BASIC programmable computer with a 480MHz ARM and 1920x1080 pixels with up to 16 million colours

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 31-May-2026 at 11:07 AM.
Last edited by OneTimer1 on 31-May-2026 at 11:05 AM.

Lately for classic hardware, I enjoy my Vic20 the most. Fun to tinker with and some software that is fun for it.

My fun has been with MorphOS over the last 5 years of so, as the software got really good and capable. It reminds me when I was using my 3000D in the 90's trying to put together a bunch of software to solve my needs at the time, lots of fun...

The new hardware is neat, if I had lots of time to put into something. The reality is that I just don't have the time and for classic computing my Vic is great. I plan on using my 128 and Amigas (to get bridgeboard and networking working) when I get closer to retirement.

The bonus for MorphOS is that I can use all the software I test and importantly request features to do real work.

Fun and yet work? Works for me!

@OneTimer1

Quote:

It sound like the reinvention of the Raspberry PI, a small and cheap computer made for Kids learning Python

Yes, Rasberry Pi has come up for sure. But I don't think RPI is what I'm talking about. It's probably a good ingredient for it, but there is too much assembly required to be kid friendly.

I'm talking about something a non-technical parent can put under a christmas tree, and the kid can take it from there. All that is required from there is a single button flip (power on), and the kids gets a "Ready" prompt or the modern equivalent. Just like the C64 was for us and our non-technical parents.

RPI is not that. There are too many steps to take, installs to make etc. post purchase. It is a project for the parent before they can hand it off to their kid. And a high percentage of parents don't have the technical chops to prep an RPI environment for an 11 year old newbie. Or do you disagree? Perhaps I've overlooked such options. Can you point me to an RPI the public can buy that fits the above description - a turn-key, kid friendly, power-button only setup that is 15 minutes from the kids first sprite animation?

Quote:

Or maybe you meant the Commander X16 a beast of an 8/16-Bit computer with more than 512kB Ram. Or the Colour Maximite another beast of a BASIC programmable computer with a 480MHz ARM and 1920x1080 pixels with up to 16 million colours

I've seen the Commodore X16, but the Maximite is new to me. I'll look into it. Both look like very interesting options.

Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 05:18 AM.
Last edited by jingof on 31-May-2026 at 09:44 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 31-May-2026 at 09:43 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 31-May-2026 at 09:41 PM.

_________________
Vic-20, C-64, C-128
Amiga 1000, 3000
AmigaOne X1000

@OlafS25

Quote:

then do it... Just talk... start and show it. The idea is not special

Well, I wouldn't want to waste my time building something that the community thinks "is not special". And it sounds like your opinion is it would be a waste of time.

And you could certainly be right - I'm not convinced myself that kids today would give a crap about something like this when ultra-realistic 3D shooters are calling their name. Hence the solicitation of opinion.

Anyway, I appreciate your honest assessment.

_________________
Vic-20, C-64, C-128
Amiga 1000, 3000
AmigaOne X1000

@Matt3k

Quote:

I enjoy my Vic20 the most. Fun to tinker with

Hmm.. I think you read the title, but not the post. The OP is not really about what's fun for us 55+ nostagia seekers.

Last edited by jingof on 31-May-2026 at 09:59 PM.

_________________
Vic-20, C-64, C-128
Amiga 1000, 3000
AmigaOne X1000

jingof Quote:

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful reply. I must admit, part of your reply dove deeply into details of hardware specification that I felt were unrelated to the OP. For example, I'll concede that: Quote: in-order Intel Atom outperformed limited OoO RISC cores although the 68060 is the better choice with smaller cores due to better orthogonality But I'm not quite sure how that relates to the point I was making. Of course, I could be missing the relevance - if you want to clarify, I'm happy to take the correction.

Fun and educational for the masses requires easy to use and affordable hardware. Maybe you are thinking of early children impressions but you also talk about programming but limited to BASIC? It is possible to make a system easy to use by making it simple and consistent but limited. The early Mac fit this category. Such computers may be useful but children will quickly out grow such computers as they learn. Powerful, well designed, flexible, expandable and easy to use computers are better for long term learning but often have a higher price. The 68k Amiga fits this bill right down to the hardware level. The 68k CPUs are one the easiest to program ever and this also made the well designed Amiga chipset easy to program as a complete system. The 68k Amiga is a programmer's dream. CPU orthogonality means the same registers and addressing modes can be used by instructions without having to memorize which registers and addressing modes work with which instructions. Compressed ISAs like x86, SuperH, ARM Thumb, ARM Thumb-2 and RISC-V with compressed and embedded extensions are less orthogonal. Compared to the 68k, the 8-bit computers with accumulator architectures are more difficult to program, often less orthogonal, often have less compact code and usually can only address 64 kiB of memory without bank switching while the 68k can address 4 GiB. This allowed a real OS, a much more dynamic system and better development tools.

BASIC built into ROM may make it more accessible but it makes upgrades more difficult and other programming languages are better to learn. Today, BASIC could be put in built-in nonvolatile memory but that is not a good use of such memory. A good OS is better with replaceable nonvolatile memory and hard drives where the software resides. It is possible to boot quickly and have access to a lot of software. Even back in the 1990s, I had 68k Amigas with hard drives that booted quickly and were kid friendly, more so than BASIC in ROM as an OS. My younger family members, extended family members and neighborhood kids had no problem using my 68k Amigas and thought the Amiga was easy to use. The AmigaOS could have had a more consistent GUI, kids would rarely reboot with a drive access light going and kids would rarely drag a drawer into another drawer making it difficult to find but they never did any permanent damage. Quick and easy access of software did not particularly encouraged kids to use educational programs but they did play with productivity software and sometimes used it for word processing. I did more programming than them but it was my computer and the most inaccessible part of the Amiga here in the US was that it was not available in many stores and could have been cheaper. Kids will do more with their own computer and a good value, low price and portability are a plus. Touch screens are likely the most intuitive followed by mouse/pointer and least of all a console. The 8-bit C64 using a console is not so kid friendly and fits in the limiting category despite built in BASIC and cartridges.

6 Year-Old -vs- 1982 Commodore 64 / iMac G3!
https://youtu.be/Itw3ZH9pyrA?t=209

The computers of kids and young adults today are more often smart phones, RPis, tablets, laptops and portable gaming devices. While ease of use is important, the most important characteristic of their hardware is good value or price efficiency (performance/$). It was not the educational angle of the RPi which made it successful but the price efficiency.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelwolf/2013/02/10/one-million-raspberry-pis-later-the-story-of-how-a-mobile-phone-chip-helped-deliver-a-vision/ Quote:

A Very Aggressive Price Point But to say the journey was an easy one would be to minimize over five years of effort, much of which was spent haggling over pennies as Upton and others tried to source the roughly 80 or so parts for the machine at the bargain-basement prices needed. According to Upton, whom I spoke to recently for the NextMarket podcast, there were times when he wondered if they'd been too aggressive in thinking they could make a computer for $35. "It's a very aggressive price point," said Upton. "We did try a bunch of routes to get there. We ended up with prototypes that were for one reason or another that were inadequate." Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was finding a computer processor that was both powerful and low-cost enough for their machine. After first trying some low-power microcontrollers, they found they were not getting the performance they wanted at the price they needed. A Hundred to a Thousand Times as Powerful By that time Upton had left Cambridge to go to work for Broadcom, in part because he saw the company was creating powerful chips for mobile phones, ones he thought might eventually deliver the combination of performance for price they needed. "You go to Broadcom and you realize they're making cell phone chips that sell for same price as these microcontrollers, but they're a hundred to a thousand times as powerful." Upton settled into his new job, all the while continuing to look for the right chip. It was a good job and a good place to be, since it gave him a great point from which to spot promising chips that were coming in the future.

I can not emphasize the importance of price efficiency enough. It is the difference between Eben selling over 70 million RPis and Trevor selling less than 7000 PPC computers. The hardware Eben started with was weak but very cheap and there was minimal standard competition at such a small memory footprint which allowed it to be cheaper yet. The original RPi only had a single scalar ARM11 CPU core which means only one integer instruction could execute at a time. A superscalar CPU can execute multiple integer instructions in parallel and there are relatively simple in-order designs and OoO designs which are much more complex. Superscalar in-order designs generally improve price efficiency (performance/$) and power efficiency (performance/W), two of the most important metrics for CPU designs. The most popular RPi model that outsold the C64 is the RPi 3 with superscalar in-order Cortex-A53 CPU cores. The X1000 has a PWRficient PA6T-1682M PPC CPU which stands for power efficient, as a superscalar limited OoO CPU core can also improve price efficiency and power efficiency but higher performance and more aggressive OoO cores become less price and power efficient. Recall Mitch Alsup saying that his superscalar in-order core was 25 times smaller than a large OoO core which is 4% of the size, uses less power producing less heat and the simpler design is cheaper to develop. If stalls can be minimized, superscalar in-order CPU core designs can compete with limited OoO designs. Even the RISC-V series 7 superscalar in-order design is using a CISC like design to minimize stalls providing better performance than a Cortex-A53 but does not benefit from a CISC ISA reg-mem and mem-reg memory accesses which are like executing 2 RISC instructions together. Good code density reduces L1 instruction cache misses and stalls and with higher level caches, smaller code leaves more room for data in the caches reducing data cache misses and stalls as well. Better code density allows for cheaper smaller footprint hardware as well. The 68060 is a relatively small but powerful superscalar in-order design which has an innate performance advantage over the RISC-V series 7 design due to the 68k more powerful instructions and better code density. The VisionFive 2 SBC with RISC-V series 7 CPU cores and 8 GiB of memory for $99 USD at least offers somewhat competitive value to the RPi despite 64-bit Linux and mediocre code density pushing up the memory footprint and cost (Pi 5 8 GiB is $80 USD but throttles in less than 30 seconds without additional cooling). The original RPi with 32-bit Linux and Thumb ISAs, with similar code density to the 68k, supports 256 MiB of memory with limitations kind of like the original Amiga 1000 with 256 kiB having limitations. The 68k Amiga can do more with less and scale below standard 32-bit Linux which is being replaced by 64-bit Linux and Thumb ISAs which are being deprecated in superscalar in-order Cortex-A cores with a MMU supporting Linux.

Is a virtual 68k Amiga still competitive as a small memory footprint computer with 600% code growth and 75% of memory lost?

https://www.buffee.ca/Why-PJIT-Why/ Quote:

In Emu68, a single 16-bit 68000 opcode can take several 32-bit ARM instructions to execute; if every opcode took just three, then that's a 600% increase in code size, not including the extra bit of code to enter and exit each block and the possibility of the same block of code needing to be translated several times from slightly different entry points.

https://wiki.amiga.org/index.php/A600GS Quote:

A600GS o 2GB system memory with 512MB allocated to AmiBench as Fast Memory o 64GB total storage The A600GS+ has enhanced specifications: o 4GB system memory with 1GB allocated to AmiBench as Fast Memory o 128GB total storage

jingof Quote:

That said, your point about the Raspberry Pi is an excellent one, and it's the part of your reply I want to engage head-on rather than wave away. You're right: Upton got educational computing to the masses at a scale the Amiga never approached, and if we're being honest about lineage, the Acorn Archimedes — ARM, UK, education-first — is the truer spiritual ancestor of what I was describing than the Amiga is. Credit where it's due. 70 million units is the dream made real. But I'd argue the Pi proves my diagnosis while sidestepping my actual point. A Pi is a full Linux box, which means it carries the exact "ocean of terms and technologies" problem from my original post — just at $50 instead of $500. It's a magnificent thing for the kid who already wants to tinker, or who has a parent or a Code Club to scaffold them. What it isn't is the bounded, get-your-head-around-it whole the C-64 was, where the machine you turned on and the machine you programmed were the same machine — no install step, no OS to manage, no distro to choose. The Pi gives you everything, and therefore gives you no edges. A small cheap PC is not a small world.

Linux has a learning curve and is fat but it is powerful and has a relatively good programming environment. There are no programming specific Linux distros but that is likely because many come with compilers and dev tools already installed. Not the best choice for being easy to use with a standard/consistent GUI but one of the better programming environments. BASIC in ROM and at the bootup console is front and center where a pre-installed compiler on a large drive is out of sight and mind until learning it is available and may even be required for Linux. BASIC in ROM is limiting while a huge Linux install can be overwhelming. An Amiga with a drive is less overwhelming because of smaller drives and more programs have GUIs and icons but I expect most compiles are still on the command line and ports of Linux/BSD dev tools sometimes have issues on the Amiga. I do not think going back to 8-bit BASIC in ROM is the answer. At least for the Amiga, a larger hardware install base to support and encourage devs and more powerful hardware for compiling would make the Amiga a better programming environment. Cross compilers on Linux to compile Amiga programs are becoming more and more common as the Amiga dies.

jingof Quote:

And here's the practical problem I keep coming back to, because it's the one nobody in the Pi camp seems to weight properly: there is no turn-key Pi. The openness everyone celebrates means somebody has to assemble the experience — pick the OS, flash the card, install and configure the learning environment, keep it running, fix it when it breaks. For a hobbyist, that is the fun. For the parent of an 8-year-old, it's a wall they will never get over — so the kid never gets the machine. The flexibility quietly relocates all the work onto the one person least equipped and least motivated to do it. The C-64 demanded none of that: you plugged it in, and the computer that booted was the one the kid programmed. "Capable but requires assembly" and "turn-key for a non-technical parent" are simply different products, and only the second one ever actually reaches the child.

The keyboard computer RPi 400, 500 and 500+ come with preinstalled Raspberry Pi OS ready to boot. Google says the install is 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS for all of them even though the RPi 500 has 8 GiB of memory and the RPi 500+ 16 GiB of memory. It does save a significant amount of memory to use a 32-bit OS and Thumb ISAs over a 64-bit OS and AArch64 but PAE/LPAE becomes less and less efficient when over 4 GiB of memory and Thumb ISAs are deprecated for Cortex-A. The guy in the following video bought $200 USD RPi 500+ for his kids preferring it over some of the other choices.

Raspberry Pi 500+: NOW we're gaming!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv3RRAx7G6E&list=PLcd1Q0-YkB1fG-zIgRR6e4MKAbYpX-8xh

There is competitive x86-64 hardware in the price range with better GPUs and GPU support but he did not like the less open Windows and Chromebook choices. The keyboard has been improved from the RPi 400 and 500 and the graphics board he tried at least worked. The RPi 500+ uses the same SoC as the RPi 5 which still uses the low power VideoCore GPU which is less than spectacular for performance.

jingof Quote:

The RetroPie and Recalbox numbers, IMO, make my case for me. Hand people an open, hackable, infinitely capable machine, and the overwhelming majority turn it into an emulation box to play our old games rather than make new ones. The creativity affordance was right there, free, and consumption still won. Which tells me the missing ingredient was never hardware capability or price. It was a designed, bounded, opinionated environment that makes making the path of least resistance — the thing a bare Pi specifically refuses to be.

Too many options, too much flexibility and too much obfuscation through abstraction makes it difficult to focus. More standardization is helpful. Front and center BASIC and a simpler computer with less choices on the C64 did not result in lots of good BASIC games though either. The good games were programmed in assembly language as they were on the 68k computers and consoles where it was easier. Most hardware is powerful enough to program in C or C++ today but the complexity and abstraction layers make it more difficult for one programmer to do all the programming or know it all. Some of the best educational tools for programming are online videos and programmers may be better off learning to work in teams rather than programming on their own. Accessibility is still important however small the percentage of game programmers are that decide to make their own games. If 1% of 7000 users program games you have 70 game programmers but if 1% of 70 million users program games, you have 700,000 game programmers. It may be easier to program games on the Amiga but, with poor value hardware vs great value hardware, there are far more RPi game programmers.

jingof Quote:

And here's the part that I think actually makes the case rather than undercutting it: this turn-key kids' product has been built before, and the way it failed is the most useful thing in this whole discussion. Kano did almost exactly what I'm describing — Raspberry Pi inside, boots straight into a child's coding OS, reviewers literally said "buy it and give it to your child" — and it raised tens of millions and got into schools across multiple continents before it ran out of road. That's not evidence the market isn't there; it's evidence the demand and the design were both real. What it lacked was a reason a family had to buy it instead of a Switch — it was, in the end, a nicer way to learn Scratch, competing against free. PocketCHIP had the same shape: lovely, preloaded, and with no compelling reason to exist over the alternatives. So I'm not calling for a repeat of those. I'm saying they proved the hard parts are solvable and the appetite is real — and that the piece they were missing is the piece that didn't exist yet.

There was the One Laptop per Child project before the RPi which was well intended and more subsidized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

There are cheaper alternatives now like Chromebooks, RISC-V open laptops and cheap Chinese laptops and tablets. Surprisingly, RPi hardware has not gone as mobile as I expected considering the low power hardware and support for displays but it has become an embedded building block and set embedded form factor standards. Maybe some of the RPi programmers became more useful embedded systems programmers instead of game programmers. The hardware is more fun to play with when not having to worry about breaking it. Users want to tinker with and hack the hardware too and RPi makes that easy and cheap, unlike closed gaming consoles.

jingof Quote:

That missing piece is Max — and not as a gimmick. Schools right now are panicking about exactly the wrong thing AI is doing to kids: hand the assignment to a chatbot, paste the output, learn nothing. A device built around an AI whose entire purpose is to refuse to give the answer — that teaches a kid to arrive at it themselves, in coding and in schoolwork — is selling something parents and educators are actively anxious about today and can't get anywhere else. That's the reason-to-exist Kano never had. The box was always buildable. What's new is that there's finally something in it worth more to a worried parent than another game console. Which finally brings me back to the A600GS and A1200NG. No, those aren't what I asked for, and the reason is the same reason the bare Pi isn't. They're aimed at us — people who already know what Linux or an Amiga is and feel something when the boot chime hits. A box that needs you to already love the Amiga to want it cannot, by definition, be the thing that hands the spirit to an 11-year-old who's never heard of one. That's not a knock on the engineering, which I respect. It's that "open hardware for the faithful" and "a bounded creative world for a kid who'll never care about our nostalgia" are orthogonal goals — and only one of them was what the OP was about.

I hope you realized I was being sarcastic about the A600GS and A1200NG toward the end of my post. They are just closed emulation boxes with RPi clones inside. Sorry, I do not see any magical educational computer for kids. If it is reasonably easy to use and accessible then kids will have fun and learn on it provided there is adequate software. Accessible hardware requires a good value, low price and modern I/O support. There is no competitive hardware in the Amiga market and that makes Amiga hardware inaccessible to kids. The best computer education would likely be for kids to try different computer systems and let them decide what they like. I do not think it is so simple to say this is what kids will like and this will be educational for kids either.

@jingof

I hope I did not sound harsh it was not meant

regarding it, if you talk about a "kid OS" in my view it would be for children that are not yet teenager, for example around 6-11 years, later they compare it with what others in school or friends so you would have no chance anymore.

Also you need something that is both configurable and restrictable and I do not see that with amiga.

Perhaps possible with linux. How big the market is and if functionality like that already is offered I do not know. The problem to restricting and limiting access of children is not completely new so perhaps already offered to some degree.

OlafS25 Quote:

I hope I did not sound harsh it was not meant

To his credit, jingof asked for honest opinions and I do not believe your opinion is anymore harsh than mine. The best computing options for kids is a matter of perspective and it is parent's opinions that matter the most outside of school. Computer options for schools was interesting back when I was in school. Schools usually did not choose the best computers, the computers kids liked most or a variety of computers to expand the perspective of computers. They did choose computers than tended to have more educational and programming software but I believe the most important reason for a certain choice was price after educational discounts which was usually Apple II and then Mac at schools near me. I had a 68k Amiga that made the Apple II computers in school look like primitive dinosaurs. Apple IIs were replaced by still limited Macs with a retail price higher than the Amiga. The Amiga did finally make it into schools in the US based on value as a further integrated embedded Video Toaster replacing ~$100,000 USD of hardware for desktop video. The Video Toaster system shows the flexibility of the Amiga to be reskinned for embedded use and ease of use but it was the value of the hardware that made it successful. The RPi has Linux software that is easy to use, has educational features and has educational support but it was also the value of the hardware that made it successful. If RPi hardware was priced like PPC AmigaNOne hardware, it would be just as much of a failure for the education market and in general.

OlafS25 Quote:

regarding it, if you talk about a "kid OS" in my view it would be for children that are not yet teenager, for example around 6-11 years, later they compare it with what others in school or friends so you would have no chance anymore.

So you are saying a competitive product is required even to sell to kids? Bingo! A competitive product will increase sales by word of mouth but the best computers for kids would still likely be outsold by more affordable and accessible computers for kids.

OlafS25 Quote:

Also you need something that is both configurable and restrictable and I do not see that with amiga. Perhaps possible with linux. How big the market is and if functionality like that already is offered I do not know. The problem to restricting and limiting access of children is not completely new so perhaps already offered to some degree.

The Amiga is very configurable but lacks security. Security is not a problem for kids unless the device has general access to the internet and even then Linux may not be able to protect them. An Amiga could allow kids access to a limited number of known safe educational and gaming websites but no access is safest. I doubt parents are worried about their kids using THEA500 Mini or THEA1200 even though they are far from locked down.

Last edited by matthey on 01-Jun-2026 at 09:46 PM.

@matthey

Good post — I really liked the videos you cited, and I think we agree on nearly every point you make. I strongly agree that price efficiency is paramount. Some of the strongest agreement is around these points of yours:
Quote:

** Fun and educational for the masses requires easy to use and affordable hardware ** BASIC built into ROM may make it more accessible but it makes upgrades more difficult and other programming languages are better to learn ** Too many options, too much flexibility and too much obfuscation through abstraction makes it difficult to focus. More standardization is helpful. ** I can not emphasize the importance of price efficiency enough. ** It was not the educational angle of the RPi which made it successful but the price efficiency. ** Linux has a learning curve and is fat but it is powerful and has a relatively good programming environment ** BASIC in ROM is limiting while a huge Linux install can be overwhelming ** I do not think going back to 8-bit BASIC in ROM is the answer. ** 1% of 70 million users program games, you have 700,000 game programmers ** Users want to tinker with and hack the hardware too and RPi makes that easy and cheap, unlike closed gaming consoles ** I do not think it is so simple to say this is what kids will like and this will be educational for kids either. ** Accessibility is still important however small the percentage of game programmers are that decide to make their own games.

100% agreement on all that. Part of the reason price efficiency matters so much is that parents won't buy a system their kid outgrows as fast as tennis shoes — so the kit would have to be powerful enough to scale up as the kid's learning expands.

Regarding accessibility, there are two halves: hardware accessibility and software accessibility. It's the successful merger of the two that I don't think exists in the market. You can find accessible software (Scratch, PICO-8) and accessible hardware (the RPi 500+) — but welding them into a really compelling and price efficient package still seems elusive, unless I've missed it. The 6-year old/RPi 500+ video you cited shows a close example, with Scratch sitting right there on the desktop. But the first touch point is still that desktop — and as you yourself put it, "Linux has a learning curve and is fat." So I'm not sure that's the right front door, for exactly the reasons you point out.

Quote:

I hope you realized I was being sarcastic about the A600GS and A1200NG toward the end of my post

Oh, definitely — I caught the sarcasm. I only responded because others have pointed me at these same options: Commander X16, Color Maximite 2, A1200, etc. To me, none of those hit the points you've made about price efficiency and nostalgia-driven marketing. That's a whole different audience, with very little intersection — as I see it, anyway.

Quote:

I do not think it is so simple to say this is what kids will like and this will be educational for kids either.

This is your most important point of all, and I agree with it. Another way to put it: these are two separate questions — 1) can such a system be built, and 2) would anyone care, is there any point? The second gates the first, so it's worth arguing both sides as hard as I can and seeing which wins.

Devil's advocate perspective

I don't want to believe what follows, but plenty of people do, and I'd like a good counterpoint to it.

I'm 58 — given your interests, you may be close. As you know, our generation hit adolescence at the same moment the home computer did. That co-maturation may be a unique moment in history that no other generation will get again, at least not for this technology.

The things that thrilled us at 11 — first sprite movement — are quaint by today's standards, maybe laughable. Perhaps modern, ultra-realistic combat simulations have desensitized today's youth to the joys of the baby steps of programming in a way our generation never was. If so, the devil wins, and the answer to question #2 is a resounding "NO."

And that's a sad conclusion. When today's 11-year-olds reach 58, they'll feel nostalgic for ultra-realistic blood-letting on a simulated battlefield, but relatively few will remember the joy of making games of their own.

The deeper problem is that these early years are when genius is cultivated. Children have larger neural networks than adults, and adolescence is partly the pruning of pathways left unused — which means what a child obsesses over can literally build their brain in ways adults can't reach. When Ramanujan was a teenager, he obsessed over a cryptic book of mathematical proofs that helped shape perhaps the greatest mathematician who ever lived. He was on another level, I know. But the C-64 and its competitors were a bit like Ramanujan's book for a whole generation — and a fraction of them obsessed over digital logic and systems design with similar intensity. Is it any wonder that generation went on to usher in revolutions in software, the pinnacle of which may be the new digital life form (AGI) now taking shape decades early? That the children of that same generation obsess instead over mass casualties on a photorealistic battlefield during their formative years is… well, "sad" doesn't quite cover it.

The affirmative perspective

Switching to the other side, I think there's compelling evidence against the devil. His whole case rests on one empirical claim: that today's kids, raised on photorealistic everything, have lost the appetite for making something crude and simple themselves. It's a believable story. It's just not what the numbers show.

Scratch — MIT's block-coding environment, about as far from ultra-realistic as it gets — has well over a million kids creating and sharing their own projects every single month, out of more than 130 million registered accounts over its lifetime. And the part that should give the devil pause: the single most common age on Scratch is 12, with 11 right behind. That's not a museum of nostalgic adults; it's a steady flood of present-day children, at exactly our magic age, choosing to make blocky, homemade things while a console with cinematic graphics sits in the same room. Roblox says the same from the other end — millions of young creators, roughly three-quarters under 24, and one of 2025's breakout hits was reportedly built in a few months by a small team of kids.

I won't overclaim — our generation's installed base was enormous (the C-64 alone moved well over ten million units, with the Apple IIs, Spectrums, and Atari 8-bits stacked on top), so I won't pretend a million Scratchers a month outnumbers us. It doesn't have to. The point is narrower and sturdier: the appetite for making, at our exact age, plainly still exists in large absolute numbers. The first-sprite thrill isn't dead. The devil's core premise is simply false.

But the devil isn't wrong that something changed — he's misdiagnosed it. What changed isn't the kid; it's the competition for the kid's attention, and the shape of what's on offer. The C-64 had a near-monopoly on our time — making the sprite move was the entertainment, because nothing else on the screen competed for it. Today that same kid's homemade platformer competes with Fortnite the instant they look up. The C-64 had a deep library of good games competing for our time too — but the game you admired and the tools to make your own sat on the same machine, behind the same prompt. The professional result and your first clumsy attempt were separated by degree, not by a wall, and that proximity made "I could make that" feel like a step along a path you were already on. Today the game a kid loves runs on a sealed console built by a studio of hundreds, and the place they might make something is a different device entirely. The aspiration and the means have been split onto different hardware.

And notice that the building-worlds that do exist — Scratch chief among them — are free software a kid stumbles into through a good teacher or a motivated parent. They aren't products. Nobody puts Scratch under the tree in a box; it has no shelf at the store, no Christmas-morning presence, none of the gravity the consumption-worlds spend billions to manufacture. So the gap was never "kids won't build" — Scratch disproves that every month. The gap is that the making side has no turn-key, gift-able product to match the pull of the consuming side. The appetite is proven; the product to meet it where parents actually shop is what's missing.

Which brings me back to my earlier neural-pruning point, because I think it's the hinge — and it cuts against the devil, not for him. If what a child obsesses over in those years literally shapes the brain they carry for life, then the stakes of putting something worth obsessing over in front of them aren't lower than they were for us — they're higher. Ramanujan had his book of proofs; we had the breadbox. They did the same quiet job: bounded, comprehensible worlds, shallow enough to enter and deep enough to fall into. And the proof that today's kids can still fall into such a world is that a million a month are falling into Scratch. The only tragedy still available to us is one of neglect — that the wanting is demonstrably there, the pruning window is open, and the making-worlds are left to fend for themselves on hobbyist goodwill while the attention-harvesting worlds get the budgets and the shelf space.

So I'll retire the devil. The answer to #2 isn't "no one would care." The caring is measurable, and it's large. Kids care as much as we did — they're just out-marketed and out-gravitied by worlds built to consume their attention rather than build their minds, while the worlds that would build them have no product and no shelf. Which lands us right back at question #1, the buildable one — and the more fun of the two to argue.

Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:59 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:57 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:32 PM.

_________________
Vic-20, C-64, C-128
Amiga 1000, 3000
AmigaOne X1000

@OlafS25

Quote:

I hope I did not sound harsh it was not meant

I did not take it as harsh - just skeptical, which I think is perfectly valid. I myself am somewhat skeptical. I see it as entirely possible that this would be building what kids need, rather than what they want. And consequently, if someone spent the time and money to build something like this, it might still be met with a "who cares" reception. To avoid that, it might have to be over-the-top amazing, to impress a kid coming off a Fortnite bender. And who has the time to build that, given the "who cares" risk. But more on that in the post to @matthey.

Quote:

regarding it, if you talk about a "kid OS" in my view it would be for children that are not yet teenager, for example around 6-11 years, later they compare it with what others in school or friends so you would have no chance anymore.

100%

Quote:

How big the market is and if functionality like that already is offered I do not know. The problem to restricting and limiting access of children is not completely new so perhaps already offered to some degree.

100%

Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:28 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:27 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 01-Jun-2026 at 10:24 PM.

_________________
Vic-20, C-64, C-128
Amiga 1000, 3000
AmigaOne X1000

@jingof

I think there are fundamental differences between now and 80s where most of us started. One fundamental difference is internet and how easy you can access software (stores). I started with C64 + 1541, no internet, not even mobile phones. Data exchange with floppy discs. If you wanted software you either had to develop it yourself, look in printed magazines and use sources from there or let it send by snail mail, what was slow and expensive. First thing I saw was blue screen and basic prompt. That to a high degree even was true with amiga, except of course booting in OS. Best source of software was school where others also used the same hardware and you could get "backup versions" of even new games.

But in any case you were directly confronted with Basic as language, the computer were much simpler so you could relative easy understand how it works. That was already more complicated on amga but still possible. But try that with a modern PC with all the different components. And you could directly access the hardware and even had to. Today you have changing APIs for everything. That is much more difficult to get into also the requrement thanks to easy access of huge software libraries is much lower.

I think it is difficult to create a similar environment today. As I wrote I think small children are still easier to influence and attract, later it is much more difficult

@jingof

RaspPi TL;DR - It's a still just a PC, with an accesible I/O port. Good for hardware tinkerers, and cheap, but still a PC with Linux.

I think trying to revive the 80's isn't the way to go for the kids masses today. It's like if our dads had told us to go play with electron tubes and punch-hole stripes. Sure that was probably exciting, for some, in the 50's, but we preferred the new technology which was C64 and Amiga in the 80's.

Today, creativity is in Minecraft and Roblox and such. These are arenas were you can, relatively easily, create your own worlds, and games. I haven't checked out how to make games in Roblox, but considering the simplicity of them, and the cheer amount suggests it's pretty simple, but still modern.
In Minecraft my kid has created whole cities with library, restaurants, police station, jail, airports with planes, highways with lightposts, railway station, rideble rollercoasters, skyscrapers with appartments, parks and woods with a lake, school (which he forces me into, together with some villagers, black board, books, lockers, playground and all, parking lots, gas station, hotel, theater, disco with DJ booth and record player, factory with working machines, grocery stores. God it's so much, and all from a great plain, not inside a generated world, but from nothing but an infinit lawn.
All of this at 8-9 year old. Amazing creativity.

Fiddling with a physical device and BASIC or assembly I think belonged to our generation. Some will like this, as you mentioned with your kid in your initial post. But 2026 too many kids I think are lost to the phones and tables, and I think it would be easier to raise the curiosity within this world. Not everyone likes programming.

My kid would probably be a good architect. He clearly has an eye for estetically pleasing interior and exterior design. Everything he does looks really good The last project is a great castle with chandelers hanging from the ceiling, ballrooms, dining rooms with a set table and painting on the walls. And a village built arount it with roads and all.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Deniil715

Quote:

Deniil715 wrote: @jingof RaspPi TL;DR - It's a still just a PC, with an accesible I/O port. Good for hardware tinkerers, and cheap, but still a PC with Linux.

Or BSD and there is even a distribution starting with a BASIC interpreter, like we knew it from the C64 ...

So what a Rasperry PI is, depends on the SD-Card you put into it, how it looks depends on the case it is packed into, you can buy it with a keyboard case and sell it as a beginners BASIC computer, or even as Laptop if you want.

@Deniil715

I think you can create interest at young children with appropriate applications and games that are simple to use, at least till they become teenager.

But classical programming is not very propable in my view, more using specialized software. At the school I was many years ago the now teach a kind of robot control software. But pure graphical, not in sense of classical programming.

And that many people develop at home is not very propable either.

World is how it is

@OneTimer1

That is true. The RaspPi is what you put into it. It is possible to build whatever hardware you like if you write something from scratch and not use Linux as a base.

@OlafS25

Yes, "programming" is on the agenda in schools today, but not in the classical, proper form, but rather getting the kids to think in logical sequence, using if and for in graphicsl blocks they can move around to make some robot move or have a lawnmower mow a lawn in a structured pattern.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.