> Imagine learning a new language, platform, with no Google or StackOverflow.

To be fair, 6502 is a small, simple language. I learned 6502 back when I was 11-12 with little more than some .txt files, a lot of time, and a question or two answered by some very RTFM type folks. That one was not too hard overall, despite being my first language. I'd never ask someone to learn some new fancy language and framework without the internet, however.

All things considered, there were a lot of resources out there but you had to do some leg work. I subscribed to Compute! There were also a fair number of machine language programming books by the likes of Richard Mansfield and Jim Butterfield.

(Maybe it helped that I was in Toronto and there was a lot interest in Commodore computers)

My mother had a friend who just had her daughter die. I volunteered to help her clean up her house. I had a Commodore 64 and was learning how to program on it. She was going to throw away the Compute and Compute Gazette magazines, but I asked if I could have them instead. Changed my life reading them and learning how the games worked and changing them. Using joystick routines to make a menu in Basic to load programs off the floppy disk and execute the address for the sys command in the menu so the user doesn't have to do it.

It was so long ago I've forgotten most of it.

Man that brings back the memories: I had a Vic-20 and had learned how (through magazines) to program in BASIC. I had the Vic-20 manual, and for some reason could not conceptualize the link between assembly language and the op-codes. I remember the day I saw a BASIC program that poked the assembly op codes into RAM for a simple keyboard - WOW! suddenly the light went on in my head. Good times.

I remember those days :-) Back then after getting tired of typing raw instructions I wrote a very primitive assembler in basic (starting with 3.5K and counting down, it had to be primitive if I wanted any space left to run the generated machine code...)

My resource for learning 6502 machine language was the Apple ][ Reference Manual: http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Refere...

which had appendices that covered the instruction set and opcodes, useful addresses, ROM listings, and all other kinds of useful stuff. What a great manual that was!