Also, much like some people are Excel wizards, some people were Apple II monitor/mini-assembler wizards or MS-DOS DEBUG wizards, or whatever other thing already lived natively on the machine. If someone has strong knowledge of the machine, a handful of carefully targeted little software augmentations, and well-developed muscle memory for the commands, watching them use a debugger/monitor can be almost like watching someone use a REPL.

TP was just so awesome, it was like a superpower compared to others waiting 10-20x as long for each build.

For me the big thing was all the latencies stacked together. Slow hard drives, slow floppies, god help you if you swapped, etc. The era was mostly waiting around for the beige machine to finally do its thing.

Thank goodness for modernity. Now we wait for white, black, or unpainted aluminum machines to finally do their thing. Sometimes, we never even get to see the machines. :(

No modernity for me, thank you! Now every time I add a component to my PC, it's a different color than the rest. It looks like a zebra, I swear.

Back then it was just "new" beige and "yellow-ish old worn" beige.

Zebras come in colors? Ours are all kinda monochrome.

I spend all day writing C++ or Python, and like playing around with Turbo Pascal on a circa-1984 Kaypro 2 as a hobby machine - the projects are certainly smaller, but my edit-compile-run loop on my Kaypro is usually faster in practice (even running on a 4 MHz Z80 with 64KB of RAM compared to an 8-core 3+ GHz workstation with 64GB of RAM) than my 'modern' work. It's genuinely crazy to me how usable a 40 year old machine is for development work.