Microsoft has released the code to MS-DOS 4.00 on GitHub; Dave takes you a tour of the code, builds it, and runs it on original hardware. For my book on lif...
C compilers (at least on personal computers) weren’t great at optimization back then and every kilobyte mattered - the user only got 640 of them, going beyond that required jumping through hoops.
Similar for MHz, hand optimization was important for performance since there was so little CPU time to go around.
C compilers (at least on personal computers) weren’t great at optimization back then and every kilobyte mattered - the user only got 640 of them, going beyond that required jumping through hoops.
Similar for MHz, hand optimization was important for performance since there was so little CPU time to go around.
And also legacy… If something is already written in assembly and you want to add a feature, you’re not going to completely rewrite it.