Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a middle schooler blindly copypasting assembly to make the mouse work in my Turbo Pascal programs, can confirm that this was extremely rare in the mid 90’s. Just having a computer at home was rare enough, the fact that you were into programming? There were like 5 of us seriously into it in the whole school of about 1000 pupils. Even now there are only about 27 million professional software engineers[1] in the worl…
I think it was more common in the 1980s for amateur programmers (including young people as I was then) to know assembly than it was in the 1990s and later for several reasons. First of all there was the need for it -- while there were compilers you could run on 8-bits, the limited memory space meant that the compiler often ended up taking too much of the memory you needed for your program, and so when people realized…
Re: LOCS: Language developed at age 9 in Z80 machine code (1988)
#21Also for Z80 you could translate the assembly code into machine code by hand quite easily. With 8086, not so much.