Ten_Mile_Hike, thanks for your reminiscences. There are of course still platforms where you can unrestrictedly Peek() and Poke(), even if these days those operations are usually presented as pointer dereferences.
Leaving aside the retrocomputing fraternity, some of whom fancy large-scale systems which have their own memory access control, there's much good work being done on microcontrollers (Atmel/AVR/Arduino, ARM including RP2040, and latterly RISC-V) which feature an unprotected flat address space.
There's also hardy individuals exploring FPGAs, and whilst these aren't directly relevant to FPC it is entirely feasible to implement anything from a low-end AVR to a '486 or SPARC on a fairly low-cost chip, together with an emulation of special-purpose peripherals etc.
So, as one switch-flipper and former user of paper tape to another: enjoy :-)
MarkMLl