For robotics, you should look into Pic or OOPic. These are the small integrated circuits that often control robots, and they have their own programming language - PicBasic. I've seen the language and it looks reminicsient of very early basic languages (like GW Basic). Knowing how to program these would be an excelent start into programming robots. There are a number of programs you can use with Linux to aide PIC software development, and there are a few books you can pick up on the topic as well.
Nothing really wrong with PIC Basic but anyone doing any serious digital controls is going to be programming in C or Assembly as it's a lot easier to control timing circuit properly. Though I agree that you might be better off trying to control a robot or robotics with a microcontroller rather than a PC. (Though there is embedded Linux as well).
For an experienced programmer PIC is probably a little too simplistic to start with. I would look at using an Motorolla HC11 or the Intel Microcontroller. You will want to get the development kit as otherwise you will need to build a circuit just to power the thing up.
Old PCs can be used for controls too but you would need to add ADC/DAC circuits to properly control and monitor your robot. Microcontrollers come with that stuff built in.
Some people have used old cpu's to make their own microcontrollers. NASA is probably the best example of this as they use 8086s (IIRC) in their shuttles.
Either way you will want a PC around that has a serial port, cross-compiler and a terminal program to communicate and program your microcontroller. This can easily be done in Linux.
Another way to go that now is very popular is embedded Linux. I am sure you can probably find a PC/104 board with built in ADC/DACs that will run a pared down version of Linux. Ideally this may be the best solutions as PC/104 boards generally are low-powered, support IDE and Compact Flash Media and take regular PC100 or PC133 memory. You can even hook up a Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse to them. An development kit for a PC/104 board probably won't even cost that much more than one for a microcontroller either though you would have to pay extra for the ADC/DAC functionality.
regards,
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