computers for children

One of the main problem in getting a kid interested in one machine is not really at the level of what they can do with it but more IMHO to what machine they are used to play with. My daughter (4) and my son (2) are both used to play with thepentium running Winblows. If I show them a game on a c64 or Apple ][ or any other machine for that matter they look at me weird and ask if they can play with the pentium since I'm not using it... I belive that if a kid is interested in programming (mine are not yet:( it is better to let them choose what machine they are attracted to. I don't know yet whether any of mine will have any interest in old machines but for the time being I'm just happy that they show any interest at all in one of them. What I'm trying to do is show them as much as I can (or as much as they can take) about other machines. I'll let them choose what they want later if they keep the interest. I can see ten years from now trying to tell my son that the C64 had an 8X1 byte for sprites and having him replying ok but how do you do hollographic simulation? Of course skill learned from old machines are valuable to understand what's going on inside of the machine but the trend today is to make abstraction of all those _annoying_ facts and use the proper library or API. (I work with Winblows programmers who have no clue how a computer operate) So I say let the kid choose. Francois.