You do what you can in the times you live in. With assembly language, you can create very precise programs that take up little machine language space as compared to higher level programming. I wrote a Keno gambling program, complete with graphics in that 2K space. A couple Computerland stores displayed my Keno program as demos in their stores. I was in a computer club, and members often showed their work to each other, and we gave away code for free.
I worked as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes, and even there we learned to be frugal with code. One of the languages I programmed was a 5-bit code, limited character set that used 62 percent of space compared to regular machine code which took 8-bits per character. Wrote and maintained some programs for police departments. Even mainframes were limited in space in the early days.
That’s incredible and great.
And yeah my question was a silly one because YOU WORK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE.
Kids today would say to me “how did you work on a 16mb computer!!!!??!!??!
I worked with what i had at the time.
Sounds like you guys were really good at what you did.