As it does for many others, news of this chip brings back fond memories. I was hired for my first programming job at the age of 19 and was tasked with writing

As it does for many others, news of this chip brings back fond memories. I was hired for my first programming job at the age of 19 and was tasked with writing a macro assembler for the 6502 from scratch. My manager/mentor had already designed the basics, and handed me a big pile of notes and flowcharts on my first day or work. Before diving in I wrote a FORTRAN version of the hashing algorithm that we planned to use, and found that we could improve performance considerably with a slight change (I got a raise for doing this). I wrote the assembler in 6502 assembler, using an existing non-macro assembler that ran on our Ohio Scientific machine. I got it to the self-hosting point as quickly as possible so that I could use the advanced features that I had built into my version. We wrote a set of "default" macros to make the instruction set more regular, filling in some holes. After some fine-tuning, I was able to compile macro-dense code at several thousand lines per minute. This was on a machine with two floppy disks and 48KB of RAM. This was an incredible "first project," given that all of my 6502 programs before starting the job had run on my Apple ][ and would fit on a printed page. I still have the listings for the assembler, and pull them out from time to time to reminisce.