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by jonjacky 4227 days ago
No, he's right. The PET and Apple were second generation 6502 machines - intended to be personal computers. The first 6502 products were evaluation kits like the KIM-1, which only had a keypad and seven segment LEDs for entering and viewing code in hex. Even this was quite an advance over the previous generation like the Altair where you had to enter code by flipping switches. This page has a picture, explains the process and shows some handwritten source code:

http://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html

(Despite the title, this was more typical of 1976 or so.) It seems awkward, but it was quite workable for embedded controllers, which was the original application that the microprocessor manufacturers had in mind.
3 comments
vidarh 4225 days ago
That may be true, but the timeline was short: The 6502 was introduced in 1975. The KIM-1 arrived in 1976, and the PET in 1977. There was really only a year where the 6502 was a realistic options without there being "proper" computers based on it.

That said, while I never wrote assembly opcodes by hand, I did know the hex values for most of the 6502 opcodes at some point. And I did later debug M68k assembler by annotating dot matrix printouts until '92 or '93 or so - I used to bring them to school with me so I could work on my compiler projects during recess.

The things you do when you don't have portable computers or network access.

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jonjacky 4226 days ago
I see that the original Apple I (not II) provided something similar, except with a full keyboard and video instead of keypad and LEDs. See the screenshot on this page:

http://apple2history.org/history/ah02/

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kjs3 4226 days ago
That's fair, although I had a pretty early AIM-65 (roughly contemporary to the KIM-1) that had FORTH in ROM. So yes, there was a time in the 6502 history where ASM was pretty much the only option, but lots of other options came along quickly.

P.S. - The Altair had a floppy option pretty much from introduction ('76 or '77, at least) as well as a cassette tape setup, so while you often bootstrapped with the front panel (unless you added a bootstrap ROM someplace; many did), you didn't have to load all your software that way. I had friends who even had paper tape readers on their Altairs, which were pretty cool.

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