Mmm. It's tempting. And I did write plenty of basic on paper in detention when I was young; that exercise certainly did force me to think in unusual ways.
But I think I'll stick to my LLMs and the fond memories of spending a few evenings sussing out resolute performance from an RP2040 PIO's whole-several assembly instructions. :)
[−]pseudohadamard · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:47 UTC ·
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Kids these days... that's exactly how I wrote code, the 6502 was simple enough that you quickly memorized all the opcodes (A9 07 20 ED FD ...), and you sketched it out on paper and desk-checked it before typing it in... which you did by banging rocks together to get ones and zeros. Ay, we had it tough, but you know, we were happy in those days.
I once worked worked with a guy who had himself done 6502 assembler, for CompuServe[1], in their home base of Columbus. Good dude; I wish I'd chatted with him more.
He wasn't happy about the position he was in while we were chatting, except it paid some bills and it provided good health insurance.
For comparison, I never learned any 6502.
But we both answered the phones the same way in that call center, and both we worked to give callers the best troubleshooting advice we could, given our understanding and ability to control that system.
I did this for my non apple 6502 machine - the issue I always had was how much space to put in between subroutines so I could change them later and not have to redo all the jumps. I think after a while I just did one 256 byte block per subroutine and screw memory efficiency (not for the last time in the following forty five years). The only time I crunched it back down was for a “use almost all 8K for the decimal digits of E” (which was fun and much faster than Pi but not totally useful as I couldn’t print them or save them to tape).
Like blowing into a gourd is still available to a modern saxophonist.
But I think I'll stick to my LLMs and the fond memories of spending a few evenings sussing out resolute performance from an RP2040 PIO's whole-several assembly instructions. :)
He wasn't happy about the position he was in while we were chatting, except it paid some bills and it provided good health insurance.
For comparison, I never learned any 6502.
But we both answered the phones the same way in that call center, and both we worked to give callers the best troubleshooting advice we could, given our understanding and ability to control that system.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe