I was 9 years old when I got the TRS-80 Colour Computer 2 and started with Basic, I had the Edasm+ assembler cartridge but was too young to understand how to pr

I was 9 years old when I got the TRS-80 Colour Computer 2 and started with Basic, I had the Edasm+ assembler cartridge but was too young to understand how to program in assembler - or at least I didn't have a mentor that could explain how the computer actually worked, it was always a point of shame for me. During Covid I found a TRS80 emulator I wrote a simple scrolling road game (driving a car) and then put my mind to learning the CPU (6809), memory map and I/O for joysticks (and learning how to poll them). It was not difficult at all, and the sheer volume of books on the internet archive is awesome. I'd ported the simple BASIC program to assembler, used Edasm+ to assemble and was absolutely blown away by how much faster the program ran in machine code. Moreover, the sense of achievement I got on behalf of my 9-year-old self was one of the coolest things I've ever done... Basic programmers were lamers back in the day, and over a few days - learning assembly - I'd taken my first steps to dropping that title and the shame of my youth. As a side note - AMOS on the Amiga was awesome, and PDS on DOS (with SVGA libraries) both me to start my first business when I was 15 (through-the-window real-estate listings). Even then the shame of being a basic programmer stayed with me, I would deliberately compress, use a 3rd party linker & hex edit the beginnings of compiled programs (on PC) to ensure nobody could work out that I was using compiled QBX (quick basic). I continued with VB, Blitz and the like until learning C# with Unity... then I felt the shame of not being able to do the equiv. of 80's assembler (shader programming). Perhaps one day I'll get over myself and believe I'm not a lamer at heart :-) I often think I was born a few years too late, things moved so quickly and I was a bit too young... TRS-80 -> Amstrad -> Amiga by the time I was 14 - and the Amiga was really complicated with it's custom chips. Anyhow. Just a bit of a rant ;-) Thanks for reading. p.s. Oh, just thought I'd add that I also played with RISCOS and BBC Basic during the period mentioned above and was blown away by how all the OS functions and so on were exposed to BBC basic, for me, this has always been the problem with Basic variants. Doing SVGA graphics on the PC with QBX required 3rd party libraries, proper TCP/IP under VB required IP/Works, and so on... back then I was always struggling - not with optimisation - but with access to features I needed that weren't offered through whatever dialect of basic I was using. BBC Basic on the other hand seems to be done right, I expect you could write any application you cared to without resorting to C or assembler.