[joezydeco]

And before JTAG you had in-circuit emulators which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. And even today we're spoiled by Seeger JLink. The Lauterbach tools used to be the only game in town for ARM besides ARM's own stuff and it was all crazy expensive. But it was pretty powerful too.

And back in those days if you were a high volume customer you got all the development tools for nothing. But that didn't help startups and tinkerers at all. Hacking hardware in the early days was not easy.