If it makes you feel any better, the guy is talking about 1982. If you were 'in' to computers at all as a hobbyist during that era, it typically meant low-level tinkering. Not at all unusual. My own personal stories from that period sound today like I was a young engineering genius, but I wasn't. The same kids who learn Rails now were the ones doing assembly back then. And plain ol' luck is still as relevant today. And, of course, persistence.
Assembly was how you coded many applications back in the 1970s and into 1980s, and tasks such as displaying output onto a serial terminal console could require as much as fifty lines of assembler on some systems.
On a "nicer-architecture" box and OS and while still coding assembler, it was still ten or so lines of assembler with a system call for the core of the output.
Why assembler? Well, you either didn't have a higher-level language around, or a C or Fortran compiler could cost you US$5,000 for a license, and US$36,000 for a memory upgrade from 4 to 8 megabytes.
Modern environments and tools are vastly more capable. And cheaper. And the tasks and applications that are now ubiquitous are massively more advanced. Debugging state by reading the front-panel accumulator lights (because you couldn't get the debugger to work) Stinks Large.
Would I trade knowing assembler? Donno. Probably. I just don't code assembler that much any more. Modern languages are vastly more capable. What you can do now with a couple-dozen lines of Objective C or Ruby code (and all the underpinnings) is massive in comparison.
