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> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my

> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!). It was indeed painfully challenging, especially due to the complete lack of information available and the fact I didn't know anyone else who knew anything about it. The only reason I persisted was that the BASIC interpreter in ROM was too slow to write any really cool games. The other thing that kept me going was that assembler was arcane hidden knowledge which bestowed power on those who could figure it out. I didn't want to "learn" assembler, I just wanted to use it and that required knowing how it worked. I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. Due to my complete lack of background in computers or electronics, the manual was pretty cryptic but that quick reference card was my constant companion that entire Summer as I used the BASIC PEEK and POKE commands to write programs. I ordered a "Monitor Program" from a small ad in the back of a garage-published computer magazine. When that cassette tape arrived it allowed me to actually read and write assembler mnemonics into memory, set breakpoints and look at registers. The next breakthrough was realizing I could use it to examine the ROM assembler code. When I finally convinced my parents to buy a dot matrix printer, I printed the entire 8k of the BASIC on fan-fold paper and went through it, commenting by hand. To your point, the fact that it was so hard combined with it being arcane knowledge was perhaps what kept me going. That and the reality it was the only way forward to get the computer to do more cool stuff.

quackduck 4y ago
> I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. lol that is such a nice story
- dboreham 4y ago
  Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).
  - vivegi 4y ago
    Yes. Around 1994 when I was in college, a friend and I were into video graphics and Intel had a video digitizer chip. We wrote to Intel (snailmail) asking for the data/spec sheet and about two months later, we received a packet with about 120 pages of the data/spec sheet.
dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
You put it better than I did. I'm younger than you so I had IRC & phpBB to lean on, but that still meant clawing out the advanced knowledge from the hands of the elders. It's where I learned that the best way to get a real answer is to first say something wrong. But at least smart enough to get a response. The feeling of mysticism and challenge is dispersed when put into an easy to grasp format. This enables more people to learn enough to reach the skill floor, but it doesn't teach those with an able mind to reach for the ceiling. I see this nowadays a lot, most people around me who didn't grow up with this culture are much worse debuggers. That's not because of their technical skills, but a lack of tenacity. Having answers be far far away means that when you start finding them regardless, you gain an inner mindset of "no matter how hard this is, eventually it is understandable". Seeing what other people could reverse engineer with extremely poor resources inspires one to try harder when there's no solution in sight. It's also taught me that I am _nowhere near as smart_ as I thought I was. To a hilarious degree. Somehow this is not a paradox.
- mrandish 4y ago
  Very well put! Although I didn't know it when banging my teenage head against assembler, throughout my long career in tech I found the combination of tenacity, humility and "down to the metal" sense of how computers work served me very well.

quackduck 4y ago

> I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. lol that is such a nice story

dboreham 4y ago
Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).
- vivegi 4y ago
  Yes. Around 1994 when I was in college, a friend and I were into video graphics and Intel had a video digitizer chip. We wrote to Intel (snailmail) asking for the data/spec sheet and about two months later, we received a packet with about 120 pages of the data/spec sheet.

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago

You put it better than I did. I'm younger than you so I had IRC & phpBB to lean on, but that still meant clawing out the advanced knowledge from the hands of the elders. It's where I learned that the best way to get a real answer is to first say something wrong. But at least smart enough to get a response. The feeling of mysticism and challenge is dispersed when put into an easy to grasp format. This enables more people to learn enough to reach the skill floor, but it doesn't teach those with an able mind to reach for the ceiling. I see this nowadays a lot, most people around me who didn't grow up with this culture are much worse debuggers. That's not because of their technical skills, but a lack of tenacity. Having answers be far far away means that when you start finding them regardless, you gain an inner mindset of "no matter how hard this is, eventually it is understandable". Seeing what other people could reverse engineer with extremely poor resources inspires one to try harder when there's no solution in sight. It's also taught me that I am _nowhere near as smart_ as I thought I was. To a hilarious degree. Somehow this is not a paradox.

mrandish 4y ago
Very well put! Although I didn't know it when banging my teenage head against assembler, throughout my long career in tech I found the combination of tenacity, humility and "down to the metal" sense of how computers work served me very well.