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My parents bought me a CoCo when I was a kid—couldn’t afford the C64 but the clearanced TI99s were sold out (dodged that bullet!)

My first programming languages were BASIC, 6809E assembly, and BASIC09. C would be there too but it required a second disk drive for the standard library and I didn’t have one.

Good thing the games mostly sucked on that platform. If they’d been any better I might not have learned to program.

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CoCo was my first computer, too. The manual taught me to program. There were listing in the back pages with BASIC code with DATA statements that were the op-codes to the 6809E machine language. It did funky stuff to get you into High Resolution graphics. I remember buying the Assembly Language cartridge as soon as it came out. Prior to that I was hand-coding machine code manually, using a the 6800 instruction set which similar because that's all I could find at the local electronics store. Some of the opcodes were not the same.. and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work for days. Hell of a way to learn how to code.

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