[beachy]

Visible memory - useful indeed. As a newly minted mainframe engineer at IBM I worked with a guy who could read from punched paper tape by eye. It was most impressive watching him pulling it through his hands at a pretty good pace, reading it out as he went.

[tomcam]

I worked with Tim Paterson (creator of MS-DOS) when I worked on the Visual Basic team at Microsoft. When he worked on code generation he just read hex dumps, not disassembly, because it was faster for him.

[ams6110]

It doesn't take that long to learn when you have to do it. When I had to write an assembler as an undergrad project I became pretty much able to read 6809 machine code directly.

[tomcam]

32-bit instruction set was much bigger with many more addressing modes