Sadly, I'm not too young to know. The Apple II had tons of documentation, including its schematics, for christ's sake, and a built-in disassembler so you could inspect anything in the ROMs. It came with two versions of BASIC -- Woz wrote an integer-only BASIC, and a licensed Microsoft BASIC. Over the years I had one, I also wrote programs in Pascal, C (with a Z-80 card), Forth, and 6502 assembler. Plus, you could wire crap directly into the game port's A/D converters; it was our generation's Arduino. So yeah, it was a pretty great box for developers.
> There was no internet as we know it today
It was the age of BBSes. I spent thousands of hours trolling random BBSes for bits of knowledge. There also were Compuserve, the Source, and Delphi -- today you'd think of them as AOL-like walled gardens. (In the early days AOL was considered just a Compuserve clone with a GUI front end.)
> 6502 assembler... not like that's a trivial task
I wrote an Apple ][ game in 6502 assembler for Compute! Magazine when I was 15. (Yes, back then, software was distributed in magazines... people would type the code in...) I urge you to find an online Apple ][ simulator and try it. It's crazy and fun. But yes, it's like going from the big lego blocks to the tiny lego blocks. You say "Python will teach you a lot about how to structure problems into smaller parts" -- writing a simple game in 6502 assembler will teach you (force you) to structure your code into even smaller parts.
I personally like bigger lego blocks and the higher-level abstractions we have today, I think it makes me ridiculously more productive and now that's what I crave (productivity = more time spent with my kids) whereas when I was younger I loved digging into the internals just because they were there.
> Awww hell. Now it's on
In a sense all computers are "just calculators". That statement wasn't meant to mock the Apple II in any way. After all, modern computers can't do "more" in terms of computability. I was mainly refering to how instruction sets were smaller back in the day. Looking at the instruction set of a x86 CPU really makes me kinda dizzy sometimes. The 6502 on the other hand has some 56 instructions (if my quick googling proved correct).
I do like the bigger lego blocks as well. They're great for doing any actual work. I'm also not trying to force assembler onto anyone. But as you point out, digging into the internals is a whole lot of fun and a very interesting journey through the world of computing. It kind of feels like discovering the very essence of it in a way. As a bonus point it teaches you a whole lot of things that might be useful one day.
Bottom line, even with today's powerful languages it's never wrong to dig a bit deeper, if just for experience and insights.
> There was no internet as we know it today
It was the age of BBSes. I spent thousands of hours trolling random BBSes for bits of knowledge. There also were Compuserve, the Source, and Delphi -- today you'd think of them as AOL-like walled gardens. (In the early days AOL was considered just a Compuserve clone with a GUI front end.)
> 6502 assembler... not like that's a trivial task
I wrote an Apple ][ game in 6502 assembler for Compute! Magazine when I was 15. (Yes, back then, software was distributed in magazines... people would type the code in...) I urge you to find an online Apple ][ simulator and try it. It's crazy and fun. But yes, it's like going from the big lego blocks to the tiny lego blocks. You say "Python will teach you a lot about how to structure problems into smaller parts" -- writing a simple game in 6502 assembler will teach you (force you) to structure your code into even smaller parts.
I personally like bigger lego blocks and the higher-level abstractions we have today, I think it makes me ridiculously more productive and now that's what I crave (productivity = more time spent with my kids) whereas when I was younger I loved digging into the internals just because they were there.
> Apple II... glorified calculators...
Awww hell. Now it's on.