> So the 8088 and assembly window was really, really small It really wasn't. Ten years later you could walk into a shop and still purchase an XT-class system.

> So the 8088 and assembly window was really, really small It really wasn't. Ten years later you could walk into a shop and still purchase an XT-class system. It ran WordPerfect (written in asm) just fine. Newer stuff had come out, but it was always more expensive. It wasn't until Windows 3.1 took off circa 1992ish that PC hardware started getting faster and cheaper very rapidly. > And people were over dos by the time Windows 3.0 was released As a practical matter, Windows 3.x required a lot of DOS configuration. It really wasn't until Windows 95 you could mostly ignore it.