Programming in any language can be tedious, depending upon the task, tools and library of existing routines that you can draw from. Like Jeff says, if you have been coding a certain type of application in assembler, or any other language, for a while, you will eventually build up a library of routines that make life a lot less tedious. Regarding Jeff's comment about the Apple 1 monitor being clever, the most ingenious little monitor I’ve seen is the 256 byte Creed monitor for the 8008 that was published in volume 1, number 7, of the Micro-8 newsletter. Just like the Apple 1 monitor, it can read, write and execute a program in memory, but it also squeezed a boot loader. It did all that with the very difficult to program, 8008. The user interface implemented by the Creed monitor is very, very nice to use. Here is a link to a web page of mine, that has a port of the Creed Monitor to the SCELBI. http://www.willegal.net/scelbi/MCMON.html <http://www.willegal.net/scelbi/MCMON.html> regards, Mike Willegal