In my small town, there were maybe 5 people, and one or two of those were at this level. I was somewhere in there, but not at the peak for sure.
Many did explore assembly language, but there is still a difference between, say writing an assembly language program, and digging deep into the guts of the disk system.
You are right about binary data. But, I must say access to information wasn't the same either. Many of us worked from what we could find in the magazines found in the grocery store. I used to take really long bus trips to the university library to photocopy useful bits.
The books we all know well, "Inside the Apple..." and "Inside DOS" were out there, but not everywhere. Our group didn't have them for quite some time.
Access to better tools was an issue on many machines too. The Apple and BBC Micro came with some assembly language support. Other machines, C64, Atari, didn't. And stuff wasn't cheap. People who came from those two machines were a little different than those coming from the C64 or Atari, for example.
One of the first things I learned to do was write a disassembler in BASIC, then an assembler. My first home machine was an Atari. Awesome capabilities, but not anywhere near the learning machine the Apple 2 was. I missed the monitor and mini-assembler big. A friend had a 6809 computer, and we both were mentored by someone who was fairly advanced, showing us things. Took a while to get ML tools. So a ton of stuff got done from the BASIC.
This is small town perspective. I think we aren't in disagreement as much as differences in perspective are in play. If you didn't live somewhere with a notable population, information often came from the school of hard knocks.
One other thing... those assembly skills varied. I still struggle with larger programs in assembly, though I'm good at hacking something, or doing little helper routines. The people showing real mastery often had tools, or were able to put bigger projects together. They ended up doing those bigger projects.
In any case, awesome times.
One thing I do find notable is those skills did have an impact. I'm on a project right now that requires some bootstrapping, and or low level development. At one point, a system monitor was discussed. A lot of people today are just used to pretty awesome tools. You use your PC to target whatever it is and go.
Not a thing wrong with that.
But, say you want to do it on chip, or piece together a big project, test, or do other things. A monitor can be used to run things from RAM, move stuff around, and of course, if you've got an assembler, you assemble to RAM, stash it somewhere, ideally storage, get all the pieces done, link 'em, or page / bank 'em, jump tables, etc... and eventually write it all out as a larger project.
Those kinds of things are foreign to many today. And that's fine because of where computing is. But you can tell who was there early and who was not, just by how they may attempt things, or the tools they use, or create.
Many did explore assembly language, but there is still a difference between, say writing an assembly language program, and digging deep into the guts of the disk system.
You are right about binary data. But, I must say access to information wasn't the same either. Many of us worked from what we could find in the magazines found in the grocery store. I used to take really long bus trips to the university library to photocopy useful bits.
The books we all know well, "Inside the Apple..." and "Inside DOS" were out there, but not everywhere. Our group didn't have them for quite some time.
Access to better tools was an issue on many machines too. The Apple and BBC Micro came with some assembly language support. Other machines, C64, Atari, didn't. And stuff wasn't cheap. People who came from those two machines were a little different than those coming from the C64 or Atari, for example.
One of the first things I learned to do was write a disassembler in BASIC, then an assembler. My first home machine was an Atari. Awesome capabilities, but not anywhere near the learning machine the Apple 2 was. I missed the monitor and mini-assembler big. A friend had a 6809 computer, and we both were mentored by someone who was fairly advanced, showing us things. Took a while to get ML tools. So a ton of stuff got done from the BASIC.
This is small town perspective. I think we aren't in disagreement as much as differences in perspective are in play. If you didn't live somewhere with a notable population, information often came from the school of hard knocks.
One other thing... those assembly skills varied. I still struggle with larger programs in assembly, though I'm good at hacking something, or doing little helper routines. The people showing real mastery often had tools, or were able to put bigger projects together. They ended up doing those bigger projects.
In any case, awesome times.
One thing I do find notable is those skills did have an impact. I'm on a project right now that requires some bootstrapping, and or low level development. At one point, a system monitor was discussed. A lot of people today are just used to pretty awesome tools. You use your PC to target whatever it is and go.
Not a thing wrong with that.
But, say you want to do it on chip, or piece together a big project, test, or do other things. A monitor can be used to run things from RAM, move stuff around, and of course, if you've got an assembler, you assemble to RAM, stash it somewhere, ideally storage, get all the pieces done, link 'em, or page / bank 'em, jump tables, etc... and eventually write it all out as a larger project.
Those kinds of things are foreign to many today. And that's fine because of where computing is. But you can tell who was there early and who was not, just by how they may attempt things, or the tools they use, or create.