Is this sort of anti-hack mentality one of the reasons why, in some versions of ProDOS, there was a conscious decision to omit the assembler, and to encourage programmers to use BASIC? (Our version, in this article, for example, had no assembler; only BASIC and the monitor program.)
When I was young, I learned to program assembly via machine code on an enhanced //e, with no references. I figured out the instruction set by making a program with all possible opcodes and dumping it out, and would write code by inputting the hex directly after assembling it by hand.
The day I discovered the mini-assembler was absolutely mind-blowing.
The mini assembler was in the integer basic ROMS. Prodos didn't support integer basic (hence no mini assembler) but the later enhanced //e roms also had the mini assembler.
I have very fond memories of the Apple //e (and I have some with broken PSUs that I must get around to fixing) I bootstrapped my own assembler on DOS3.3 using the mini-assembler.
On Prodos I bought the full development kit which came with an assembler and a nice debugger. Wrote a Forth for the Apple with help from Loeligers Threaded Interpretive Languages and a copy of Starting Forth by Leo Brodie (both borrowed from the library) good times...
Mini-assembler was in all II, II+ and //e. II had Integer Basic, II+ and //e had Applesoft. Can't remember which ones had SWEET16 though. May also be "all of them".
If all you want is LISP, burn it into an EPROM and replace the stock one.
It was absent from the II+ due to the larger Applesoft BASIC interpreter. If you had a "Language Card" (a 16K expansion that brought the machine to 64K) you could load Integer BASIC on the card and use the assembler.
Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in the enhanced IIe ROM.
Sounds familiar; I used to use it on our II+, so I was rather bemused by all these people telling me they (II+) didn't have it.
I don't have access to my Apples at the moment, so can't check the details, but I'm now curious to know exactly what might have changed between various II+ - what did others gain that we were missing, or why did we have room for it when they didn't...
