my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 and/or 95 included abasic and qbasic (iirc). if you held down shift while booting, you'd drop to a prompt and could just write code.

I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work.

I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.

>nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements

Well you can do ctrl shift J or similar in the browser and start typing javascript, or open the terminal. It is all a bit more complicated than BASIC in the old days though.