The thing I appreciate in retrospect is how different the basics were, which led to an early exposure to porting code and learning the underlying platform. So

The thing I appreciate in retrospect is how different the basics were, which led to an early exposure to porting code and learning the underlying platform. So many systems relied on peeking and poking it was also a junior level intro to assembly. Assembly was where you really learned to program since most of the basics took too much memory and were too slow. Basic was still an awesome thing at the time.