The stuff people write for old consoles and computers is pretty amazing. Computers definitely evolved faster than they needed to for the general public. All of these industries were built around taking advantage of Moore's Law instead of being about getting them most bang from existing limitations.

A 6502 can easily power a robot to bend metal and other objects. You can bootstrap everything else from there.

So can a machine built entirely from discrete components. A VAX 11/780 had no microprocessor at all. Just a CPU built out of components.

Not quite - the VAX-11/780 relied on what was essentially a LSI PDP-11/03 as a general purpose glue processor (the “console interface board”) for the CPU initialization sequence, console and floppy I/O, and other assorted tasks.

We could call it Bender.