Props from me. I loved Desqview, it worked great. I didn't really use high memory other than for Desqview and SmartDrv.

Once the 386 came around it was so much easier, Watcom C++ was my favorite way to take advantage of my luxurious 16MB I could afford at the time.

Compiling helloworld.c with one floppy and no hard drive on the original PC required one disk for each of the following: (1) source code, (2) cpp.exe, (3) cc1.exe, (4) cc2.exe, (5) lib manager (can't remember the name - something like "marion"?), (5) and the linker -- I think it was 8 floppy swaps total. It blows my mind that my first HD was 5 MB and cost $800. Also missing was the programming side things: LocalAlloc vs. GlobalAlloc, low-mem HWNDs, etc. - ug - don't miss that...

I realized yesterday that for years I've been mentally measuring data by how many Amiga 3.5 inch disks it would take to store. Noticed this when I was patting myself on the back for getting the build output of the tool I'm working on down below ~60 disks.

At the same time the system felt much more controllable and understandable from a user POV. And I sometimes feel that Linux is going through a similar transition, at least on the user space level.

Yeah. Forth was a lot more productive -- one floppy, single-pass compile-and-load, a REPL. Turbo C too a little later.

First hard drive I bought was 20 MB. And I thought there was no way I'd ever fill it.

And the FAR PASCAL calls as well.

And QEMM which made it all work...

Right QEMM and DESQview. I could copy/paste between WordPerfect, Lotus123 and Reflex :)