Considering the RAM and storage restrictions of those machines, hosting a compiler would have been quite challenging. Where would it store object files or the f

Considering the RAM and storage restrictions of those machines, hosting a compiler would have been quite challenging. Where would it store object files or the final executable? On Datasette? And, the 6502's CPU stack is limited to a whopping 256 bytes! With an interpreter burned into ROM, we only needed the BASIC code to reside in RAM. And, of course, the occasional assembly routine to speed things up. I remember how entering a hex dumper (and disassembler, if possible) was always among the first things I did on such a box. I hacked the ROM of the Atari 800 to find out where those BCD floating-point subroutines were located, so I wouldn't have to run the computation loop of my Mandelbrot fractal generator from BASIC. That made a hell of a difference. Today's sports disciplines are a bit more elaborate. It came to the point where I could enter 6502 instruction codes in hex from memory because the instruction set is so small you could actually have it memorized, just as a side effect of daily use. I still remember the elation I felt when I finally got my hands on a machine that could actually run a C compiler and had “high-resolution” graphics, not to mention an operating system that was documented. It felt like changing from a horse cart to a racing car. Today's computers are science-fiction space ships compared to that. Another old man, out.