alt Hacker NewsWhat Woz did was the default way of writing assembly language programs for owners of 8-bit computers (mostly hobbyists). You didn't have money for a second machine, so you wrote your program on paper, you entered it then tested it in situ. Mostly you got it right, as doing it on paper was slow and meant you had the opportunity to put lots of thought into it. 8-bit instruction sets were simple enough that you eventually learned the most common instructions by heart. There was a point where I could mostly translate a Z80 program from assembly to machine code from (my) memory.
Maybe that is part of the nostalgia for the 8-bit days: the practice of "slow programming"? It was relaxing, sort of like those "slow tv" shows.
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I got my first computer, a C64, when I was 14 in 1985, and wrote my 6510 assembly in paper as well.
You had to carefully calculate the address distance for a branch instruction. The release of DISMON was a revolution: suddenly the computer did all of that for you. It even supported moving pieces of code to a different address to make space for inserting more instructions somewhere!
Yes. My first serious program was done this way. At the start of the project (final year of EE degree, 1981) I didn't really understand what a program was, but I learned by studying the technical reference manual for the Intel 8085 CPU. It kind of seemed like magic, I can mold the functionality by storing codes in memory? Wow!
I figured out exactly what I wanted to do, wrote it out very carefully on paper, looked up all the hex codes, wrote those out very carefully, adjusted addresses etc. as needed. This took many hours spread over weeks. Then I entered the whole thing on the hex keyboard and display of a primitive development board each time I needed it, perhaps an hour or so each time (I think I only did it twice). It worked first time, because why wouldn't it if you were sufficiently meticulous about your work in a process that was very obviously very intolerant of the tiniest mistake?
I must admit my program (gather input information from some transducers, do some calculations, present some results) was likely somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude simpler than a complete Basic interpreter!
My first exposure was Commodore PET computers at the high school (I'm old). Nobody had home computers then, this stuff was crazy expensive, even a floppy disk (singular!) to save your work on the shared drive (on a dolly - it could be hotplugged) was >$20 in today's money. But what you could use all you want was the line printer (a CBM 2022) and its consumables. So at the end of whatever computer room time you could scrounge (lunch, who needs lunch?) you'd print off your 3-4 page epic program to continue coding and debugging with a pencil, on the long school bus ride. This does form "slow" habits. To this day I detest autocomplete, autoindent, syntax highlighters and the like. Never did hand assemble though.
There was a #hexcoders channel on IRC back in the 90s, admittedly very dead, and not just because octal is better for x86 code.
How exactly did you "enter it" without a second computer though? Was there a simple test rig or something that you would make as an electronics project, where you would input opcodes and ascii and it would write it to a rom? Only real thing i can think of.