That said, I agree that a simple and constrained environment can be great for learning and creativity. This is one of the reasons I'm currently writing a Logo interpreter reminiscent of ones I used as a kid in the 80's, using an Apple Logo II manual as a guide. Hopefully I can get my almost six year old daughter interested in playing with it!
Plus, just because it's written in Go I don't think an application should have extra "go's" in it's name!
I wonder if the kids a few years behind me say things like "they stopped using floppies right before I started" or "I never did see a dot-matrix printer actually print".
I also wish there was a simple micro out there. I still have an old senior design project sitting in a drawer at Tampa Hackerspace. It's a Jeopardy style quiz show buzzer system built from a Z80 (old even when we used it), I think a 8255 (because I had a pile of them), a little TTL glue, a EPROM with a few hundred lines of hand-assembled code, no RAM, and a 555 timer for a clock. The clock is so slow that we also used it for the audio for the buzzer. It's been a fun board to haul out and throw on a logic analyzer to show people. Can't probe the address bus on an ARM or Atmel. But kids today probably look at that like I used to look at tube testers.
[1] - http://science.slc.edu/~jmarshall/courses/2003/spring/cs10/l...
For what it's worth, the guy in the video seems to sell clone kits. The kit and assembled version are the same price as the original assembled machine, $621 (though the replicas have a lot of additional stuff thrown in). Not exactly a cheap, but if you really want one, you can get one.
I have dreams of creating a modern microcomputer. A computer for the hacker masses, inexpensive with modest specifications and simple design, with ample parallel and serial IO. Something that puts you close to the metal with few distractions and limited complexity, like an arduino but interactive and self-contained. Like what the Raspberry Pi was meant to be, but without binary blobs and complicated operating systems.
Is that an idea that appeals to anyone else? Whenever I think about it, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I know some of it is nostalgia, but I also think there is a lot to be said for the creativity and inspiration that arises from working in simple constrained systems.