> In school, at the transition from terminals to micros, a friend of mine walked up to one of the new Commodore 6502 machines and entered a simple program in he

> In school, at the transition from terminals to micros, a friend of mine walked up to one of the new Commodore 6502 machines and entered a simple program in hex directly into the monitor program. For a while I had the common opcodes for the RCA 1802 memorized, due to working with a project board without an assembler (writing assembly on paper, then hand assembling into opcodes, then keying in the opcodes). Ha ha, nice. Early on in my learning programming, I got a book about the Commodore 64. Written by a 16 year old (!) kid from the UK (IIRC), it had, in Commodore BASIC, the complete listing (using POKE statements :) of an assembler program for the C64. I typed the program into a C64 I had access to, over some days (making mistakes with the hex codes in the middle of the listing, a couple of times, and having to start the whole thing over), and finally ended up with a working assembler. Then wrote some 6502 assembly language C64 programs using the assembler, including for simple graphics. >There's no returning to those days and I wouldn't if I could, but I can't help but think that I was lucky to have experienced that for the knowledge and perspective. Agreed - and a lot more along the same lines, later on DOS and Unix too :)