This is great. When my daughter was 11 and wanted a 'computer for her room' I gave her a VAX[1]. She had a lot of fun learning a bit of C programming and playing advent and rogue. And I had realized that for me and my generation we had these very accessible computers of that time and my kids did not. I think some of that need is being met by RasPi's and Arduinos (look at how successful the Kano Kickstarter was [2])
When you talk about folks like Gates or Jobs or Woz or pretty much anyone from the early PC days, the stuff they "learned" on was pretty straight forward. Any high school kid could write a driver for an ISA card in DOS, that is certainly possible in Linux but I find the learning curve to be much higher. And without those little triumphs to keep you going it is hard to stick with it.
[1] A VAX 4000/VLC which is a really compact and nice VAX, running netbsd.
When you talk about folks like Gates or Jobs or Woz or pretty much anyone from the early PC days, the stuff they "learned" on was pretty straight forward. Any high school kid could write a driver for an ISA card in DOS, that is certainly possible in Linux but I find the learning curve to be much higher. And without those little triumphs to keep you going it is hard to stick with it.
[1] A VAX 4000/VLC which is a really compact and nice VAX, running netbsd.
[2] http://www.kano.me/