[awful]

You are spot on, was there. The Ataris and ostensibly the Timex/Sinclair's were doing graphics from the very beginning, with their built in BASICs; typing in programs from the popular magazines. The Atari MAC/65 assembler came in 1982; the cartridge in 1984. Manx C in 1986 for Amiga. My school taught BASIC from "Micro-Soft" on an Altair. I went directly to doing bit level ops on Burroughs mainframes directly afterwards. And I still have all my Lattice C software for my Amiga circa 1990.

[DerekL]

By the way, the original Atari models, the 400 and 800, did not have BASIC built in. (They may have been bundled with the BASIC cart, I don’t know.) Subsequent models had it built in.