Porting Doom to the 3D0 Console

Becky recommends Assembly Lines, by Roger Wagner then writing a game for an apple ii emulator. Others have done similar projects with chip-8, which I think is even simpler.

The type of advice given makes sense if one has either a huge amount of free time (both in the short and long term), or works professionally in that field (like the guest did in the past).

But in real world, that's not something that works. Programming for old platforms is fun and has historical value, but there are a lot of problems that don't make sense today. It's not particularly educative to write lots of lookup tables, or to know optimized (that is, fast enough) 16-bit additions, let alone divisions (and problems like these are typical once one writes something that it's not just a "hello world"). Heck, even programming (optimizing) for a 286 is significantly different from how one would program assembly today.

Having said that, I'm definitely not against learning the lower level, but just to focus on a relevant low level. There are different approaches, but a good starting point to understand modern computers from the bottom up is the series "Write great code" by R.Hyde, volumes 1 and 2.

If one wants to program on 6502 for the sake of programming on 6502, there are plenty of books on archive.org to learn from. It's not easy to find good ones, and they're somewhat hard to read because they're bad scans, but some are very valuable in terms of learning assembly by writing non-trivial, real-world routines.

I've programmed a bytecode virtual machine, and while not the same as bare metal assembly, it made it easier for me make sense of assembly (while also greatly benefiting from learning to code the virtual machine). Crafting Interpreters was the book I followed.

https://www.chibiakumas.com/ is an excellent ressource

If you want to get into assembly code in general, I can highly recommend getting into CTFs (capture the flag, "competetive" hacking.) It's a lot of fun and if you go for the reversing or pwning tasks, you'll be directed towards x86 assembly almost immediately. There's _loads_ of content (e.g. writeups) to get you started. I remember using the site pwnable.kr quite a bit :)

It was a separate company founded by EA's founder, Trip Hawkins. Not an EA product.

The BBC has always had a public education mandate in some form. My memory is hazy but I feel like it’s faded somewhat in the last couple of decades.

Specifically here the BBC Computer Literacy Project ended up creating a line of home computers, and direct government funding put them in (I think literally) every school.

https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/

Check

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgEzG7F5d8

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

The BBC (computer) is interesting because due to whole project this machine was ubiquitous in UK schools, but at the same time it was a machine that almost nobody owned personally.

I have fond memories of playing "Granny's Garden", and other games during school hours, and some kind of political simulation where you had to manipulate taxes and get voted into power for a second term to win - I can't remember the name of that game though.

At the time children in the UK would be significantly more likely to own the C64, or the ZX Spectrum - the latter of which was by far the most popular computer at that time.

I never knew anybody who owned their own BBC, but numerous friends had the other computers (even weird machines like the Jupiter Ace).

Like many people at that time I learned to program in BASIC, by reading the instruction book(s) that came with the Spectrum, then graduating to Z80 assembly language - used mostly to remove anti-copying protection, and gain infinite lives on games - before moving on to PCs a good while later.