I guess that's true! I switched from writing in BASIC to writing in Z80 assembly after a year or two - though it has to be said that I "compiled" my program by

I guess that's true! I switched from writing in BASIC to writing in Z80 assembly after a year or two - though it has to be said that I "compiled" my program by hand, referring to the opcode table(s) at the back of the manual. My resulting programs tended to look like this: 10 FOR N=60000 TO 60000 + 20 20 READ A 30 POKE N,A 40 NEXT N 50 RANDOMIZE USR 60000 100 DATA 1,2,3,4,5,.... As you can imagine it was a tedious process. Most of my time was really spent trying to hack games for extra-lives, which I guess wasn't so unusual back in the day. Later I used the same skills to patch binaries to accept serial numbers - before I started writing real code in C, Java, Perl, etc, etc.