To be fair to the modern BIOS, there is a whole lot more hardware to initialize than in 80s and 90s, the added ROM space isn't consumed only by bloated compiler

To be fair to the modern BIOS, there is a whole lot more hardware to initialize than in 80s and 90s, the added ROM space isn't consumed only by bloated compiler output. Some motherboards store a second pristine copy of the BIOS image for fail-safe upgrades. > and elegantly clever Asm I personally miss returning boolean result in C (carry) flag.