[vidarh]

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.