[mark_something]

I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.

It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!

[commandlinefan]

I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.

Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.

[tverbeure]

I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.

[mark_something]

I was more lucky, I bought a book about C64 assembler in a second hand book store with my pocket money (must have been in 1989 or 1990).

[commandlinefan]

I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.

[tverbeure]

I’ll never forget 53280 and 53281.