Given how much any kind of peripheral used to cost in the 8 bit home computer days I imagine how much that hurted.

All my stuff on those days were equally Christmas or birthdays gifts, or having to save up during months.

My first Assemblers were a mix of hand translating opcodes into DATA code blocks, and then I upgraded to hexdump editors, never managed to acquire a proper 8 bit Assembler, and during the first year of PC, MS-DOS debug was the only way.

My first Assembler was also A86/D86 shipped on a 5 inch floppy in a book I think from Sybex, no longer certain.