[OT] Early-to-middle IBM-PC history (was: End-user uses for x86-64)

[Michael ODonnell]

> Apparently, you never had to fight to get 3 KB more
> out of conventional memory, to load just one more TSR
> or that much of a bigger program.

RAM was indeed precious, leading to some extreme maneuvers.
One of the cooler TSRs I used early-on (around 1983) was a
driver that implemented a RAMdisk and the entire driver resided
in just under 512 bytes of 8088 assembler code, which meant that
it could live in its own "boot sector", ie. in the first 512
bytes of the RAM that it was using for storage, on the assumption
that nobody would write to the boot sector of that "drive" ...