I had the SYM-1. I was given a Basic EEPROM, but Assembly was mo-better.
Yep.
I read just now on the SYM-1 Wikipedia page that it had an oscilloscope display option.
That's funny, because I developed one of my own for the KIM that did true X-Y plotting on a scope, a 256x256 grid of dots. I set up two 8-bit latches with inexpensive 8-bit passive (resistor network) DACs, and rigged the Y latch so that when you wrote to it, a triggerable one-shot would fire. The X and Y DACs went to the horizontal and vertical inputs of the scope, and the one-shot went to the "intensity" input (brightness).
So you would latch an X value, then a Y value, and the invisible beam would move to position (X,Y) on the CRT, and then when the one-shot fired, it would brighten the beam for a few microseconds, producing a single dot on the screen.
The CPU had a display list of X,Y pairs, and it ran that list to produce graphic displays made from dots, meanwhile computing position values and so forth.
I wrote routines that produced 7-segment digits from dots, and eventually had a complete "Lunar Lander" program with a little sprite of a lander module with variable retrorocket flame, and numeric displays of altitude, descent velocity, and remaining fuel.
All the computations, the display routines, and the display data pairs, fit inside the KIM's 1KB of RAM, and the thing ran in real-time on the 1MHz 8-bit CPU.
Now, THOSE were the days.... LOL :-)
I bought a copy of Tom Pittman's TINY BASIC ROMs for the KIM, and got that running with an ASR-33 teletype, but BASIC was never my favorite language. Like you say, Assembler RULES.