Ever since my early days with a Radio Shack Model II (I know, no one in their right mind would buy one, but I did) and buying every copy of the magazine, "80-Micro", I have realized that it's the hobbyists that keep this thing alive. Every issue of "80-Micro" had BASIC and some Z-80 assembly language listings that us "computer nut-cases" could key in and run on our wonderful TRS-80's with that lightning Zilog Z-80A processor, smoking at 4 mhz.
The hardware forced compact programming and a heavy utilization of machine language routines...otherwise, at 4 mhz and 64 KB of RAM it would take all day to run.
Since then, with almost unlimited RAM and sizzling processor speed, "Bloatware" has become entrenched and the need to keep programs small, tight and fast is gone, except for a few programers who still insist on producing tight software.
Microsoft Windows (all versions) is the best example of "Bloatware" and it always has been. The system is way too big at installation time and to add insult to injury, it constantly claims more and more of you drive space as you use it. If you pay any attention at all to what's on your hard drives, you will notice it inflating.
Unlike you trend followers, I blazed my own trail by buying a Zenith Z-100 with the Z80 processor, the 8086 card and a whopping 128K of RAM. A year later I bought a 10Mb hard drive for it. I had to pull out one of the two 360K disk drives to make it fit.
It was a big step up from the Heathkit I had.
I remember that the DOS card was all elbows. If you were running in Z80 mode and switched to DOS, you couldn't switch back because DOS would grab all of the low memory space and wouldn't give it back, even if you terminated DOS.
There are a few programs that are still coded as tight as those we typed in or borrowed on cassete tape. Well, they aren't written in assembly, but they're still tight.
Go download a copy of the source for qmail or djbdns. I threw in the programming towel a long time ago, but my small exposure to C is enough to know really good code when I see it.
flamebait
Then again, if he was a real programmer, he'd program in COBOL.
/flamebait