G,
Love it ......
Having started out on mainframes, I then started playing with the earliest crop of micros in the mid-70s (was it really that long ago ?) .. the only way to get anything done was to work low level ... almost all of it, of course, is now just a very, very vague memory. Now that PC and software houses have gone the way of an every year upgrade to force people to scrap the old gear and software which did a perfectly good job (albeit with not so many unnecessary, but flashy, bells and whistles), I guess that not many people at the user level bother with low level programming any more .... ?
I vaguely remember, as an undergrad, the department getting a PDP-whatever, which had, if I recall, 8k of RAM, a paper reader for input, and a teletype for output. Not to mention an HP-whatever, which had something in the order of a few hundred memory steps. ... now I have to pull out the manual to work out how to use the old slide rule ... sad, isn't it .... dinosaurs forever !!