I had a Rockwell AIM-65. Learned assembly on it, then went to 68HC11, now using 9s12C32. Still using assemble. Can’t get into learning C. Made a few half hearted attempts.
I blew away the instructor by doing one project with four lines of code that everyone else needed 4 or 5 pages...and instructor for the class wrote custom OS’ for JPL
(It was a water flow sensor in just shifted a bit mask back an forth bases on a sample to trip some switches)
...when i put my mind to it a can write some incredibly elegant tight code ..but that cuz I get obsessive about it rewriting it and rewriting it to shrink it down....did some provisioning for a Cisco Nexus 7000 for American Express that had the senior Cisco CCIE on staff crazy to understand how the code worked.