The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.

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EvanAnderson an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I remember being so confused, as a 10 y/o kid, trying to follow examples from an Apple II-era book on my public library's Apple IIe computers. I didn't understand why I couldn't get the mini assembler to work. The idea that features would be removed on future machines simply didn't occur to me. I guess I really didn't even understand that the IIe was a different machine than what the book was written for since most everything else worked as-expected.

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boomlinde 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's common in the C64 world to use freezer cartridges that allow you to interrupt normal operation and invoke a monitor program. These typically include rudimentary assemblers and disassemblers as well. Fun and useful for patching and reverse engineering!

	▲	boomlinde 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Btw, I've only had a rough idea of how these are actually implemented, non-maskable interrupt something-something, and never knew how they make sure that the interrupt vector points to some persistent routine that can invoke the monitor. I found this great article explaining at least how The Final Cartridge 3 does it (in the first two sections): https://www.pagetable.com/282

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abecedarius an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I felt the same way.

There was another downside, that the Applesoft BASIC license gave Microsoft a hostage which they later used to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC. Hard to tell how much it mattered that the Mac came with no user programmability, which had been expected for PCs till then.