Professional writer on technical, academic, economic, & business topics. Learned to code assembler on a CDC 3150 with a 6-bit byte & 24-bit word. All discrete components, no ICs. It was, however, SOLID STATE! It had magnetic core memory and no memory protection - which is why they ran the student assembler jobs LAST each day, as we had a tendency to perform an unconditional jump into the middle of the operating system and start eating it.