Thanks for the little trip down memory lane. Despite the much greater scale that modern tech gives us in almost every way, there is still something special abo

Thanks for the little trip down memory lane. Despite the much greater scale that modern tech gives us in almost every way, there is still something special about the early PC era, when an enthusiastic geek really could know every command that DOS provided (because your PC came with a manual that described them all and you could read it cover to cover in a few hours) and understand how the OS worked all the way down and what all the DOS and BIOS APIs (as we’d call them today) were for. In those days, you could write your own toy programs by running your debugger, manually entering assembly language into some memory, and then writing the memory from that address verbatim to a .com file, which DOS would happily load and run similarly verbatim (so make sure you remembered to exit at the end, or you’d end up executing whatever was randomly in the memory just after your program). Given luxuries like a higher level programming language, a real compiler and an interactive text editor, a single programmer could even write a useful application like a compiler or word processor or game to a professional standard within a reasonable amount of time. Though, as this article reminds us, sometimes you had to jump through some hoops that seem quite eccentric by modern standards to do it. For the record, I have never been a fan of pink shirts on book covers, though as defining moments in your life go, getting that book as a curious and very nerdy teenager was probably one of mine. I guess today the equivalent would be finding some tutorial videos on YT or copying and pasting lots of code from SO, but somehow I doubt any of the kids learning to program like that ever enjoys the same feeling of truly understanding your PC and how you can use it that we had back then. Or maybe there are secretly clubs of 13-year-olds making a ground-up Linux distribution that will take over the world running on Raspberry Pi supercomputers and open hardware smartphones in 10 years and I’m just too out of touch to know about it. ;-)