Indeed, an assembler, and a computer to run it on, were luxuries in those days. I'll bet a lot of early code was hand assembled. It wasn't too hard on 8 bit mac

Indeed, an assembler, and a computer to run it on, were luxuries in those days. I'll bet a lot of early code was hand assembled. It wasn't too hard on 8 bit machines. I coded on grid paper. In reality, all it took was a few dozen lines of code and I was simultaneously hooked on coding, and motivated to earn enough money to buy a computer of my own. In addition to having access to computers, even just being able to get a copy of any software and do anything with it were a bit of a hurdle if you had started at the chip level.