> $180 if I recall correctly, which was a truly staggering number of birthday and Christmas presents I had the same problems, only I was programming a Laser 12

> $180 if I recall correctly, which was a truly staggering number of birthday and Christmas presents I had the same problems, only I was programming a Laser 128 (an Apple II clone) that had a built in System Monitor, which let you directly change memory addresses, but no assembler. So I photocopied the Assembly to Machine Language chart in a book I got from the library, and did it manually - I learned quite a lot. I remember writing a layout and edge detection routine for a Tetris clone I tried to write (never finished it). Basic was too slow for those critical parts, so I called out to the routine, but did most of the code in Basic. I remember been utterly wowed that Linux came with a free compiler - I could only dream of having software like that back then.