God I love this thread. XD
For the physics degree at the Univ of Washington back in the stone age, we had a lab class that was, literally, build a Motorola 6800 based logic board, then interface it with some other piece of apparatus in the lab and do something interesting.
Two partners built the logic board. Input was a hexadecimal keypad, output was an 8 character LCD screen... so yes, it was all assembler, hand translated to hex and punched in one character at a time, in sequence, into memory. Which was volatile.
Partner hooked it up to an ultrasonic pinger to measure distance. I asked if I could piggyback on his data, and instead of interfacing with an input device, interface with the oscilloscope instead. Prof was confused, but said 'have fun'.
X-Y leads on the scope turned it into a CRT.
I wrote a differentiation function that took the distance data, turned it into velocity data, then into acceleration data, and with pressing '1', '2' or '3' would display the d, v, and a on the scope as a graph. '4' would display all three at once.
In a total of 4096 bytes of RAM.
Rare to dust off those skills, but sometimes it's still useful.
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