My first language that wasn't. I taught myself 6502 asm before I have even seen it run. The local British Council library (UK sponsored library going back to co

My first language that wasn't. I taught myself 6502 asm before I have even seen it run. The local British Council library (UK sponsored library going back to colonial times) had 3-5 books on computer programming, all of which I memorized. Among those books was one on the BBC Micro assembly programming. It had a few worked examples. I used to cover the examples with a sheet, read the problem, then try to solve them before looking at the answer (since I didn't have a physical machine to test things.) -- I quickly came to appreciate that there was no canonical single "answer" in algorithms, and the only way to compare the "equality" of two solutions is see they leave the machine in the same state, given identical initial configurations .. very disturbing thoughts for a self-taught newbie programmer. I did that for a few weeks and was bored. Then got Robert Lafore's book "Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC and XT", and I killed it. Hard to explain this, but my first working assembly programs were quite advanced, because I have been "paper hacking" for quite some time by then. I wrote my first apps off of a floppy disk that I used to insert into internet cafe or library computers, when no one was looking (I didn't do any of the PC speaker tricks until much later, when I got my own computer.)