Back then assembly makes sense and many pieces of "large" software were written in assembly (or at least a critical part of them). Go back another decade and p

Back then assembly makes sense and many pieces of "large" software were written in assembly (or at least a critical part of them). Go back another decade and people naturally take assembly as the second language after they are done with BASIC. Those were teenage hobbyists. Machines then (Apple ][, C64, BBC, etc.) were much simpler and didn't have a lot of memory. It was a lot easier to wrap your head around it. Nowadays it's impossible to do so I think, unless you have a long track of assembly career.