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Looking at this source code I'm astonished by how many lines of code it is. I've never written more than the most basic (ha) of assembly language programs in my lifetime.

How does all this assemble into a 60k binary?!

Also, wasn't it true that Steve Wozniak was able to bootstrap the entire Apple I BASIC in hexadecimal from his own memory? How can that be? I'm reeling.

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Each line gets translated down to a few bytes, maybe two to ten depending on the opcode. The downside being that each line doesn't do a whole lot.

And I can imagine that this is an absolute ear pull to try to debug with the tools they had. It's more akin to debugging embedded systems to the PCs we have today.

I wrote an implementation of BASIC for work a year or two ago, and there's a massive nest of case statements to figure out the resulting data types of operations. Grey(er) beard in the next office pointed out I was probably replacing one page of code in the thing I was emulating.

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