[blasdel]

If the iPad has a way to enable the Webkit Inspector, you’ve got your tinkerer’s playground right there! The equivalent of Ctrl-Reset is about:blank.

  Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC

I’m sure that in your day there were curmudgeons who grew up with Altairs railing against the kids these days that bought computers that not only had one-chip CPUs (make your own damn ALU from TTL), they even came fully assembled! Just like you didn’t want to have to deal with wire-wrapping and debouncing yourself, kids these days don’t want to have to deal with stupid implementation details like booting an operating system. Just as you wanted a standardized BASIC prompt that let you punch in code listings you got from friends and magazines, kids these days want a standards-based browser that they can use to tinker with the whole world’s creations.

Having your code running persistently on a server (whether abstracted like App Engine and Heroku, or old-school like a VPS) where other people can interface with it is far more important to the youth of today than something that dies along with your battery and wireless connection.

[joe_bleau]

Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).

[DougBTX]

Open up your iPhone, fire up safari, and type this into the address bar:

    javascript:alert('hello_world!');

With a bit more glorification, that could turn into a dev environment.