Beautiful article. Thank you very much for this moment of nostalgia.

Yes, I own a ZX Spectrum 48K. My first real programs were written in BASIC, pascal and assembler on Spectrum.

I remember I had to compile my longer Pascal programs from a cassette :)

I wrote my first computer game in Spectrum BASIC.

My best program so far was 800 bytes long. A ZX80 disassembler including command line interface and several really nice features :)

Yes, I was counting cycles and optimizing code all the time.

I was dreaming machine code.

Thanks again for this tear of beautiful memory in my eye!