@mike Imagine replacing every emulator's "exchange" folder with a little animated cartoon character: "This is Jeff, Jeff is your best friend's big brother. Sometimes Jeff gives you unlabeled floppies with cool stuff on them." and then you can click Jeff in the emulator and it shows a window of your floppy images to mount.

Maybe show any floppies you got from Jeff as a stack onscreen, or a diskette box?

@mike nostalgia is a wonderful thing. The computers in stargate have been adding to my joy

@mike I think those of us that did that actually learned quite a bit about programming, looking at the code, thinking about what it did. Quite educational!

@mike There are still functioning C64 BBS systems online with downloadable games. Check out user @particlesbbs from the particles bbs.

@mike I was going to suggest trying an intermediate level of difficulty such as OCR the magazine program listing, debug it, then paste the text in line by line.

And that's where my brain finally caught up with the coffee and I thought "wait, *where* are you pasting it from?"

Because your notion is paper to eye to fingers to keyboard to physical C64, and where is the clipboard in that process?

So I went and ate some bacon on toast instead.

@mike I had that experience, but on PC (Amstrad PC1512) rather than C64. 10 pages or so of machine code in a gw-basic wrapper but before they started adding decent error checking to the basic wrapper. After days of typing in hex, and not having it work, another day or so of painstakingly checking what I'd typed to find the mistyped bytes.
I do not have the compunction to do that again, regardless of nostalgia goggles. :P

@mike I've done this with emulators and ya know what? It's not fun.