>> One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems"
>> by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft.
You confused me there, the book doesn't cover Minecraft, you did that yourself after reading the book, got it.
The book is absolutely fantastic, it is the basis for the "From Nand to Tetris" courses:
https://www.nand2tetris.org/
I haven't digested it in full and with a title like that and the boring cover I always have to scramble to find it when I got a few minutes (What is that "Nand to Tetris" book called again?)
> (which I don't think existed at the time anyways)
This surprised me at first because I remember using Python to create Minecraft maps early on, or at least in the beta.
But it seems like redstone was added in the alpha, and the earliest commits of pymclevel (which I think I used) also dates back to the alpha. So there might indeed have been a time window of a few months in which redstone was available but not tooling for creating maps.
I remember starting playing Minecraft Beta, that was around 2011 maybe?
Even if tools to programmatically create maps were available, I wouldn't have known how to program. So this is more about my lack of knowledge of tools of the time.
Funny, I bought that book and studied it because I heard about it in a Minecraft video. Was that you? Nand2tetris helped me land my first programming job.
4-bit is small enough that you can build it manually, without the use of external tools (which I don't think existed at the time anyways).
Highly recommended for children interesting in computing!