BASIC and (UCSD) Pascal were the mainstream choices on 8-bit micros... with BASIC being far and away the dominant language in the amateur and low-volume profess

BASIC and (UCSD) Pascal were the mainstream choices on 8-bit micros... with BASIC being far and away the dominant language in the amateur and low-volume professional market mainly due to ease of use and that it came bundled with every 8-bit micro I recall using. On 16-bit micros that was around the time more powerful high-level languages started to become available (for example, XLISP was released in 1983. AmigaBASIC released in 1985 was quite powerful for its time). So you are correct that options were limited in '83 mainly because 8-bit micros were very, very storage (RAM and disk) constrained. It was commercial, student and hard core amateur, developers who developed in assembly in the 80's. C was only ever 'high level' when compared to assembly/machine code. Manual memory management was an indicator that it wasn't high level at all. That said, much commercial software was still written in assembly back then as that was the only way to wring the performance out of an 8-bit and even early 16-bit micros. It was the transition to 16-bit, when all that 6502/6800 code became obsolete when C really started to take over.