That's pretty similar to what the OP covered. Except part of the attraction was NOT having to install or configure special tools. Remember having BASIC always-on was what made it so accessible.
I get it, after you do this you can just log in and voila Basic. Still until Linux comes with this as a special user login, there's a gap in the experience.
Agreed. There was something universal, almost magical, about ROM BASIC.
For me it was Commodore BASIC on the C64. I turn the machine on, and instantly there's a little flashing prompt inviting me to give it some input.
Having to enter commands here to LOAD from tape was what initially sparked my interest in programming. I'm telling the machine what to do, and it's doing it right away. Wow.
There was no barrier to entry. And despite valiant efforts these days, it was so much better than the modern "making programming accessible" ideas. I didn't have to install anything. Every C64 I would encounter had this functionality. It didn't feel like a dumbed down second-class-citizen environment. This was how you interacted with the machine.
I think that main-streaming of general purpose computers has killed this. I can't imagine booting my primary machine to a BASIC prompt now (or even a shell, I guess). It would make listening to music, watching videos, checking my bank balance or accessing my virtual machines for work.
I don't have separate media devices. I can't just throw on my headphones and listen to my walkman while my computer is busy with something.
Although modern computing has unlocked a lot of potential, I think we've made too many compromises. Outside of industrial and scientific applications, most computing devices try to be a jack of all trades, being everything to everyone, and doing poorly at it. Like so many contemporary software engineers (myself included - I mean, the modern tools and frameworks are too large and diverse know as intimately as we used to know computers).
We have to cut ourselves a bit of slack here. Sure, 8-bit computers came up in a BASIC prompt... but they could default to a BASIC prompt because they had nothing else to do. Modern computers do. We do need to at least spot ourselves having to tell the computer to bring up this environment rather than something else... after all, if there are so much as two wonderful learning environments we need to be able to pick between them.
If you insist, you can build a kid-friendly distro of Linux, and then build custom computers to put it on which come up straight into this environment... but given that that's been tried before, I'm not terribly optimistic about that shutting down the continuous stream of complaints of this nature.
And I guess that I know this is a popular opinion amongst a certain segment of the programming population, but the scientist in me can't help but note the large number of times this has been "fixed", yet, literally years and decades after the fixes, the complaints are still flowing, virtually unchanged. Personally I think the most likely explanation is simply that this is an incorrect diagnosis of the problem. Tempting, easy, seductive, but incorrect.
Further evidence for the incorrectness: Despite the way that many programmers got their start in this environment, I'd point out that far, far more people were exposed to this environment and still did not become coders, or worse, decided that computers weren't for them. I don't see any particularly concrete evidence that leads me to believe this was that special of an environment, once I discard nostalgia. At the very least we'd need to show some sort of difference between two environments without the confounding factor of a dozen orders of magnitude difference in performance, to say nothing of the other advancements made since then.
You don't even have to log in: it just comes up when you boot the system. I think if you install the server version of Ubuntu, no GUI automatically starts so you could run this on tty1 (first VGA console).
Anyway, I understand the OP's point. You are right that a new computer does not come up this way right out of the box.
I could see setting up a bunch of Linux machines like this, to recreate something like the C64 school computer labs of the past.
First install basic: apt-get install bwbasic
Next find where getty starts the login program, but change it to run basic instead. In Ubuntu: /etc/init/ttyS0.conf:
You will see this on the serial port: bwBASIC is a shell.. so you can type "ls".. or "exec emacs"..