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
Real Programmers...
You have given yourself away as one of us "cave men" who used to write COBOL by the mile. A typical program (fan-fold print-out) listing would be as thick as a telephone directory. Fortunately those miles of COBOL compile down to some machine code that the old IBM 'Frames' seemed to love.
And who could forget CPF...my favorite CPF error message. "Error ocurred during file transfer. Approximately 0 files were copied."
And it always was zero files...maybe IBM was being cautious, thinking a few bytes may have slipped through.