> 320x256

LUXURY. We had 32x24 b&w characters and we were glad of them.

(ZX81, nominally 256x192 pixels but only accessible as 8x8 character cells.)

LUXURY. My first experience with programming was some programmable TI (I think?) calculator that had 8-digits LCD screen and a memory of 39 "slots".

In the manual, there were some programs you could type in, including "Mars Lander". The calculator shows a landing speed (e.g. "8.2") and then you need to type the thrust adjustment (e.g. -1.0 or +3.0) and then the new landing speed is shown. If you do it right, you land safely and it shows "00000" or something. But nah, that did not happen, you just crash ("11111")

Following that, when I got ZX-81 with 32X24 screen, and like, 1Kb of memory, I was in heaven :)

I seem to recall that there were characters made up of all the options of quarter squares, so you could have a pixellated display of 64x48 at least

edit: seems like HN doesn't support these characters but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

I made a 'zooming through a tunnel' program in assembler once, using them

You are, indeed, correct - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81_character_set

Although in the context of developing on small screens, they're not very helpful.

(And if you redefined the character set on the fly, you could make things like Forty-Niner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTTWMIQVznM )

Hey, I did say I was relatively young :) I wouldn't have minded starting on Commodore 64 or Apple ][ or anything, but I missed by a decade or two. Oh well.

You can still do that, these machines are emulated pretty much perfectly.