In my time of IBM jr's, apple 2's, and c-64, learning assembly language and producing small code was number 1. In fact, tons of computer magazines taught basic and assembly to help kick off the Computer revolution that was to come. I used to get snobby with program size when I could write a 128byte assembly program compared to 12KB the c language produced just to output "hello World". In my time, multi-tasking was writing a Terminate-but-stay-resident prgram setoff by a "hot-key".

