I guess one actually realistic version of the fully-jacked-in-hacker fantasy is network guys who are in so deep that they can read bin/hex numbers fluently without consciously "converting", etc. This I know of, and from there, I can conceive of someone who has become familiar with the binary representations of certain instructions? Or something? But I guess it would have to be a very specific (and probably read-only) situation. And, unless I'm missing something, it wouldn't amount to a deeper or more enlightened understanding of anything meaningful to software concerns
So-so, honestly. Was okay at the time. Sorry for not sharing it, but that’s how I feel.
Btw, reading and calculating hex is not that hard. In Hiew (and other hex/asm binary file editors that showed hex together with mnemonics) you quickly learn that e.g. B8 xx xx is “mov ax, imm” and C9/CB is a return. You can actually spot these in an 8-bit hex view, and yes, code has a pretty distinct feel in hex and ascii/exts. Zips and data don’t look like code.
For me hex code was read-only, but I remember my granddad entering programs through literally 8 on-off switches plus some more on a pre-sinclair “computer”. I could input hex values. He could input D0-D7 and #CLK itself.
That said there’s not much “hacker” in it. It’s just a knowledge induced by a relatively low level tooling and the times. We did what we did out of interest, not for social attitude. So yeah.