Thanks. Nice links. I love the handwritten assembler pic with mapping from mnemonics to op codes. If you had to punch it in on a hex keypad, you absolutely needed that. Unfortunately, I never was organized enough to have different color pens :-)
As a high school student I didn’t have the money to buy a 6502 assembler and I used to write my assembly code out in long hand on graph paper, hand-assemble it and type in the hex in the monitor.
As a 13-year old, I didn’t have an assembler so had to write one first, in BASIC and then eventually in assembler. It was the lack of the thing which made me proficient in building the thing lacking. Plus, my 8-bit machine at the time (Oric Atmos) didn’t have much software distribution in my neck of the woods ..
1. My 1976 KIM-1 https://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-1976-kim-1.html
2. Getting the KIM-1 to talk to my Mac https://blog.jgc.org/2025/02/getting-kim-1-to-talk-to-my-mac...