The commodore 64 is still so much in the thoughts of people that played, hacked, have incredible afternoons with it, that a few months ago, to help a friend in economic troubles, I started designing in the CAD , printing with a 3D printer and selling on Etsy miniatures of the C64 and we have quite a number of orders every week. I never imagined it to be a popular item in the shop, and I was wrong.
If you are interested, I'll tweet about it soon. An argument tangent to that: when the Raspberry PI went out I hoped it could be the "new C64", in terms of something that children could play with, start writing code, but nope, nobody so far nailed it.
Yet I fully believe there is room for a cheap computer that will introduce children to programming, like in the '80s, to happen. Pretty sure the magic is that you turn on the device and you can immediately type code. You can load and run, of course. Those are the first commands, but then you can also try print etc. If the raspberry pi didn't open into a linux prompt but a python REPL and you used python to load, save, run, I think it would have the same programmer nudge effect that the 80s machines had.
Lots of microcomputers back in the C64's time worked this way. So there's more to it than that. I think it's popularity now is based only on that it was popular in long ago.
Why it was so successful long ago, is likely a combination of a lot of factors. I was unclear: I meant the magic of turning kids into programmers, which I agree was a feature of many most? This was in response to the comment I was immediately responding to, and not the article posted.
