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The thing that has changed since the old 8-bit days (incidentally, I once saw a graph of gender ratios of computer science undergrads over time; before the home computer generation, the ratios were a lot better than they are now) is the difficulty of doing things. With an old 8-bit home computer, making some graphics appear on the screen, and making it respond to the keyboard, was pretty easy; there wasn't really a distinction between the graphics commands and the "core" of the language.

These days... your core language might be nice and easy to learn, but if the libraries and APIs you need are difficult, then the learning curve becomes awkwardly shaped.

Anyway, I had a thought about archiving, as it's odd that people don't seem to bother with the comments. I had a look - the API documentation is really quite rotten - and found something. Try this URL: http://www.dreamwidth.org/export_comments.bml?get=comment_body&startid=0

Now if you view the page source, and then save the page source, then you've got a nice file. I don't have a lot of experience with teaching programming, but it looks like the sort of file one could set a lot of very nice pull-something-out-of-this-file exercises on. Put it like this: if I see a file like that at work, I smile and say, "this shouldn't be too hard".