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After some time wrestling with this same dilemma myself, even though I have the beginnings of a museum of 8-bit computers in my garage, I finally settled on one of the few devices with imbedded BASIC still being actively produced and developed with a lively community of people (mostly middle school and high school students themselves) creating and sharing programs still today: the TI-8x family of calculators.
There are some limitations - the screen is tiny, there's no QWERTY keyboard, and the commands are not standard. But it's simple to learn and use. Ten years ago, I wasn't beginning programming on my TI-85 - that honor falls to the Apple IIe and Amiga - but even while I used C and learned Java in college, I still enjoyed the novelty (and unique challenge) or creating complex programs on such a platform.
