You were lucky. My first computer had 256 bytes of RAM.
<Four Yorkshire men on>
Well we had it tough. We had t’toggle in bootloader on t’front panel switches in Octal before we could load us own code and we had t’hand assemble it in us heads.
<Four Yorkshire men ofn>
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I started on a HP 1000. Once you memorized the bit book, 'twar grand.
If I remember correctly, I spent a major part of my summer vacation in ca. 1984 designing the hardware of a Z80-based computer and first drafts of its simplistic firmware, everything just with pen on paper (including the conversion of assembler code to binary, with just Rodnay Zaks’ famous Z80 book and Southern Denmark’s distracting-free environment, the latter of the two only an unknowing young man like my younger self would dare to consider boring), just to realize towards the end of the vacation that buying the components would exceed my pocket money budget 
.
But it was a major learning success 
.
73 de Martin, DK3IT
PS: Apologies for having started an off-topic distraction in this serious thread.
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Bringing back memories here. Rodnay Zaks and also “the complete spectrum rom disassembly” were my bibles back in the '80’s.
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I just had a look along the nostalgia shelf here in the shack… Zaks’ Programming the 6502, Leventhal’s Z80 assembly language programming and 6502 assembly langauge programming and many many more.
I thought why am I keeping these when I can get a PDF with what I need. Then I checked the prices at Abebooks and found that nice condition copies are being advertised for between £40-£65. Yow!
My Leventhal 6809 version is missing along with my 1st and 2nd editions of Stroustrup’s C++ book. But I do have a genuine 1978 1st edition of Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language”. All well thumbed but not opened now for a good few years.
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You joke but when I was at school we used to go to do some programming at Trent Poly. The initial boot was loaded by switches (Hex not Octal) giving enough code in the core for it to find the high speed paper tape reader with the OS…but I can’t remember the name of the computer… ( It ran about 16 workstations) (Edit - It was a Nova and I think it was the 840 as I remember the loading switches on the front panel…)
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Wow, that image took me back being an apprentice in the early 80,s. We briefly built and maintained wire wrapped control boards, amongst other types, just as it was all starting to be replaced with PLC’s and microprocessor based control gear.
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