Typing in listings from magazines every month and then debugging stuff that didn't work to figure out if I mistyped it or if the magazine made a mistake was such a fantastic learning experience!
Child of the 80s here. I won a couple of those back when. I got one published by Nibble magazine (Apple ][+ assembly) and one in BASIC got me a free disk at Beagle Bros. I loved 6502 assembly language.
Your comment was a fun trip down memory lane. I'd read Nibble cover to cover, and especially scrutinize Beagle Bros advertisements because of the little one liner programs they'd often include. Good times!
Well, depending on which population of middle schoolers you base on. The whole population? Yes it was extraordinary. The ones owning a micro-computer? There it was more common indeed.
As a middle schooler blindly copypasting assembly to make the mouse work in my Turbo Pascal programs, can confirm that this was extremely rare in the mid 90’s. Just having a computer at home was rare enough, the fact that you were into programming? There were like 5 of us seriously into it in the whole school of about 1000 pupils.
Even now there are only about 27 million professional software engineers[1] in the world. That’s 0.3% of the population. Looking at USA alone, 1.4% of the population are software engineers. We are extremely rare.
I think it was more common in the 1980s for amateur programmers (including young people as I was then) to know assembly than it was in the 1990s and later for several reasons. First of all there was the need for it -- while there were compilers you could run on 8-bits, the limited memory space meant that the compiler often ended up taking too much of the memory you needed for your program, and so when people realized that BASIC was too slow/limited for what they wanted to write, assembly language was the obvious alternative. Secondly, the assembly languages of 8-bits was generally 6502 or Z80. These are relatively simple processors and learning these architectures (as I did myself) wasn't that hard. Once x86 machines took over in the 1990s, assembly because less attractive both because compilers were more practical because of larger memory and because x86 assembly is frankly a nightmare.
Uncommon, but not extraordinary. I did it. Only one or two others at my school were familiar with asm, but I came from a very small town (the single integrated middle and high school was 800 pupils)
