I've done a bit of embedded development for 8-bit machines in the modern era, and I sincerely tip my hat to the engineers who were doing it in the 80s. Even wit

I've done a bit of embedded development for 8-bit machines in the modern era, and I sincerely tip my hat to the engineers who were doing it in the 80s. Even with the best tooling available, you'd have needed an enormous amount of organisation and discipline to keep track of your code. I was doing some research about the assemblers available for the Hitachi 6303[0]/Motorola 6800[1] in the early 80s, and I'm amazed by what people accomplished with the limitations of these tools. Just to name one thing, the two assemblers I've linked to only supported SIX character labels, and no local-only labels within subroutines either. To compare, in my own work I was limiting myself to FORTY characters for the sake of being descriptive. Having said all this, the relative simplicity of these architectures is really refreshing compared to embedded work on modern systems. There's something to be said for being able to roughly keep track of the whole system state in your head. 0: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/hitachi/_dataBooks/U24_Hitachi_6301_6801_Assembler_Text_Editor_Users_Manual.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/components/hitachi/_dataBooks/U24_H... 1: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/exorciser/M68MASR_Macro_Assemblers_Reference_6800_6801_6805_6809_Sep1979.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/exorciser/...