The C64's BASIC V2 had no graphics or sound commands, which was a massive draw-back on the one hand; on the other hand, it pushed lots of teenagers into learnin

The C64's BASIC V2 had no graphics or sound commands, which was a massive draw-back on the one hand; on the other hand, it pushed lots of teenagers into learning machine code. For lack of an assembler, the initial way to use it was to hand-compute the op codes and put them into BASIC's "Data" directives, which you could read in a loop and store in some free area using POKE and then call from BASIC with the SYS command. One wrong number and the whole thing hangs, reset, type it all in again or load from a music cassette if you were lucky and had stored a recent version on tape (which took many minutes to read back in whilst giving various beeping sounds).