This is something that definitely should be displayed where both younger people and my generation can see it working – the chap who is building it has a day job designing embedded systems on standard size SMD chips (the same size in modern computers). He doesn’t say much about himself but I reckon he is around my age but has at least one if not two University degrees, with at least one if not both from Cambridge.
One thing our generation missed out on (as they had been deemed obsolete by the time we were taught to program computers) is the computers with “blinkenlights” on the front; showing the values of registers and memory as LEDs or seven segment displays (that can also show A-F in hex). Using these and single stepping the code makes it easier to visualise what is happening to the data; this is important when controlling I/O devices via ports, inspecting processor status flags or other boolean flags; and such things ADC/DAC and serial to parallel data conversion.
In some cases oscilloscopes and logic analysers can show this info; but especially with modern computers it all goes way too fast for a human to inspect it or the amount is so overwhelming it is difficult for a student to understand it (I only just know the basics myself).
