Late 70s, I worked for a company that built embedded monitoring equipment. They'd been using the Intel 8051 coding it with assembly and had just done their first Z80 boards. I was fresh out of college and told them I could code it in C in 1/4 the time they'd been getting assembly code done. They gave the go ahead and I bought Whitesmith's cross compiler. I was able to code and test on the pdp-11s, then burn ROMs to test on the target machine. They were stunned when I requested another 4K of ROM, but went ahead. We did several devices this way before I moved on. They never went back to assembly though. Fun times.