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abecedariuslast Thursday at 5:02 PM0 repliesview on HN

No argument, it was terrible. :) But still I had good times and started learning to program.

The assembler cartridge was nearly as useless as the BASIC cartridge for the Atari VCS. (Not that I ever tried the latter, but similar problems of very limited memory holding text you'd typed in, the assembled program, and whatever data it's processing at runtime -- and needing to save to cassette tape before you can start on anything else.) However, the CPU architecture actually did give you a nice clean assembly language once you had enough of a system to really code in it.

Being away from the mainstream... isn't an advantage but I'd have to call it part of my development as a programmer. I had to get into Forth for a reasonably powerful system.