I suppose Hitachi is no longer making the chips? The 63B09 was a "super" 68B09. The 6809 was superceded with the 68HC11 by Motorola (now Freescale).
All that to say if you want to "try [your] hand at programming," you'd be better off with a newer chip such as a Microchip PIC, or Atmel. TI was offering a USB thumb-drive size development board for their tiny MPS chip for about $20, Renesas also has dev. boards.
I have 10 of them and a book to boot that i got at a plant that i work at been reading a lot about microcontrollers . Just wanted to use the one's i had but I think your right newer would be easy to find dev. boards for. I was thinking that a ET-ARM Stamp Module
would be good . Thanks for your in put.