Dave Plummer

And so I was writing small things, and I had a machine language monitor

that you could load from cassette.

Didn't have an assembler built in, but a disassembler.

So you could enter the op codes and 6502 in hex.

And if you were careful about planning, you'd be able to write some basic programs.

So that's kind of how I learned.

And, uh,

The first thing I ever wrote on it was a clone of Galaga.

Now, it's a bad clone of Galaga, but it has the major enemies that attack over time, and it's all written in hand-coded machine language, and you can't relocate 6502, so if you need to add code in the middle, you need to manually insert a jump to somewhere else, do your work, jump back to where you were.

It's just hideous spaghetti code.

But it all worked eventually.

And I went to make a backup of it to preserve it for future scholars or whatever the hell I was doing.

And I copied my blank floppy onto my data floppy.

So that was my first experience with data management.

So I don't have a copy of my first program anymore.

Yeah, there was a huge amount of guilt because, right, you destroy several weeks of work and you know it was because you rushed or you did something stupid or you made a mistake.

So it's literally machine language.

Not assembly yet because there's no assembler built in.

So I should have written an assembler as my first task, but I wasn't that clever.

How hard is that to do?