>I swear that experience of learning Z80 assembler by typing in the hex or decimal opcodes (I couldn't afford an assembler), was the single most important event

>I swear that experience of learning Z80 assembler by typing in the hex or decimal opcodes (I couldn't afford an assembler), was the single most important event of my programming career. I eventually graduated to doing the same thing - in my case writing out assembly programs on paper, putting the decimal opcodes next to each instruction. Once the main program was "assembled" you'd then go put in the jump targets - which had to be calculated last, as you didn't know how many bytes each instruction you'd used was until that time. All my programming started by accident, as the family-computer arrived as a Christmas-present one year. The tape-deck didn't work, so we couldn't load any games, and I was "forced" to read the manual instead. At least back then computers had decent manuals..