Variations of this comment are made on just about any story about 4kB intros. This is not a very interesting point to me because of how it forgets that in any

Variations of this comment are made on just about any story about 4kB intros. This is not a very interesting point to me because of how it forgets that in any case, software never exist into a vacuum, and hardware is needed for it. And that hardware does perform a great deal of duties. The subtext often is that for some reason it's less noble or impressive to code against APIs. However hardware also is a sort of API of its own. Even on a ZX-81.