When I was a kid in the early 80's, I couldn't use my TRS-80 Model I during prime time TV hours. The main TV antenna for the house was located in the attic above my room. When I turned on my computer, the interference would essentially wipe out the VHF-Lo channels. Sometimes I would forget until I heard my parents yelling from across the house. Ah... good times...

For good tones, you had to get down close to "the metal." I recall that there were a few programs like this, but I believe they were written in assembler or machine language so as to control the cpu and bus directly.

Back then most programming for those machines was done at that level!

When I first laid eyes on the "High Speed Job Stream" in UofT's Sanford Fleming building (that particular building has since burnt down and been replaced), students were running jobs in PL/1, WATFIV, LISP, SPITBOL, COBOL, and many others.

In the labs, there were IBM Selectric terminals dedicated to APL.

And there was a BASIC dialect over at what was then "Ryerson Polytechnic." There was a room with terminals and acoustic couplers, no security to keep you out.

You need a username and password to use the terminals, but the username and password for each class was posted on a corkboard, so you would write your own programs as long as you didn't get in the way of actual students trying to finish their assignments.

I don't doubt that "most" programming was done in assembler, but there was no shortage of higher-level programming going on.

I said most programming for those particular machines. I agree that mainframes had largely moved on, and probably the larger minis too. My first exposure to programming was time-shared Basic in 1972.

You know, I think we've somehow fallen into _violent agreement_ on all subjects.