Since I was a relatively impoverished college student and had no prior experience with computers when I got my first, a 4k 6809-based Tandy Color Computer, I learned Coco BASIC and then 6809 assembly language (using Radio Shack's ROM cartridge-based Assembler/Editor), I had no inkling how spoiled I was. The Coco's Extended Color BASIC was quite advanced for the time (as compared to the stock ROM BASIC's on comparable micros) and the 6809's ISA was leagues ahead of the 6502 and Z80. I had no idea until much later (post 8-bit era) how relatively primitive the ISAs were on the 6809's 8-bit peers. Since it was all I knew, indexed and program-counter relative addressing just seemed like the obvious natural way of things.

I also didn't understand what was meant by "orthogonal instruction set" when I read the term in Osborne's 6809 book. I just thought every instruction and addressing mode for each register and stack pointer would always have a complete set of its logically-implied counterparts in all CPUs! :-) Oblivious to how fortunate I was in these ways left me feeling especially jealous of the dedicated graphics and sound hardware of the Atari and Commodore 8-bits.

Learning on the 6809's advanced architecture along with the multi-tasking, multi-user, UNIX-like OS-9 operating it enabled, left me uniquely well-prepared for the future of computing in ways other popular 8-bit micros couldn't and I never even appreciated it at the time.