It does have a real time spell checker. But it doesn't seem to have the squiggly line. The screen blinks at you when you type a word it can't find.
I've just run Prowrite 2 and 3.1.1 via FS-UAE.
So my memory is wrong about that feature have a red squiggly line.
It did have realtime checking. Also Prowrite was WYSIWYG. The realtime checking is neat, but it's actually a bit annoying with the blink. The red squiggly line is a better way to show that there is an unrecognised word.
"Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.[12] The spell checker included the relatively rare, for the time, option to check on-the-fly. It also added document statistics display, including the number of characters, pages, etc"
Honestly I'd guess it's one of those things that possibly originated at Xerox Parc and then got added to consumer products from the 1980s onwards.
Personally, I remember it because I remember seeing Word 6 and thinking 'at last they have caught up to Prowrite'.
A windows laptop from today is vastly easier to code on that a C64 or whatever. Most houses would have an internet connection as well so they can get to all sorts of things.
A Raspberry Pi is probably something richer kids get to play with.
Primary School kids today in Australia often get a Chromebook and have some tutoring in Scratch. Again, it gets you the ideas of coding in a way that more kids will get.
You mention the lack of alternatives that got you and other kids into coding. That's probably a thing. There is so much more entertainment available today that most kids probably don't get bored like kids did in the past and sat down and learnt to code. It has to be more intentional.
When I was a kid my mum was a teacher and brought home a computer over the school holidays which had no games. I taught myself databases and spreadsheets because there was a good tutorial on that.
There is also probably something in that until, say, the 2010s computers were not quite ubiquitous enough that they were a constant part of kids lives. Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s there was something almost magical about the devices. A kid today who grows up in a household with smartphones, tablets, laptops and multiple smart TVs probably won't get the same thrill about moving an object around a screen as someone did 30+ years ago.
Check out 'Coding for Beginners Using Python' by Osborne.
Also have a look at 'Coding Projects in Python' by DK books.
Both these books are excellent and would enable a smart and determined 11 year old to learn to code.
To be honest these books teach coding in a way that is much easier than it was in your day. You can also jump on many, many websites and teach yourself how to code.
You're also an exception. Many, many kids read those old Osborne books and only a very tiny fraction like yourself became coders and an even smaller fraction became as successful as yourself.
Creating a good story, getting good actors and getting it all to come together is hard and still costs millions. At the end you may also not get your money back
Take 'I Swear', a very good recent film. It's well worth a watch.
It's made 8.3M. Has it made the money back?
It's not going to compete with 'The Mandalorian and Sidekick'.
That's likely to make several hundred million and still be fairly poor.
Yeah. It's a remarkable problem. There is a clear solution that is happily used for men. You tell people what to measure then have the clothes sized for the various dimensions.
Charles Tyrwhitt have this guide where they tell you what to measure for shirts :
https://twitter.com/siento