Turbo Assembler

What I feel was the most difficult course in obtaining a computer science degree was the compiler class. I wrote it alone, in an apartment for months and months, I actually started writing the tokenizer before the course even started. The professor was knowledgable, but very old school, he did not look at any of the students work until the very end of the semester. The class was packed for a few weeks but by the end, only a dozen people were left. Writing a compiler is a big task for someone to do. You have to write code for the interface, as well as code for the assembler. I used turbo assembler to create my executables and MFC for the interface using Visual Studio 6. That Visual Studio's IDE was so much better than Borland's. I was nervous to use it at first because I knew and used Borland for nearly all of the assignments in all of my previous classes. I stuck with Turbo Assembler because again I was familiar with it and didnt want to learn a new assember in addition to a new C++ IDE. I was reminded of this class recently when I saw a MASM site on the net.

I wonder if TASM is still around. I finished the compiler and passed it off during finals week, Kim Oberg finished his a month or two earlier because his wife was due right at the end of the semester. Nothing felt better than hearing the professor say, "You passed.", it was like all that time invested was finally worth it. I knew that moment that I was going to obtain my degree in CS, I just finished the toughest course while working 30 hours a week and taking a full course load.

The first computer I had was a 486Sx, I wanted the 486DX but it was too much and my Dad bought it so you can't complain. I think it had a 400MB hard drive which was "double-spaced" to 800MB. It ran MSDOS 6.2 and MSWindows 3.1. I got games for it like the first graphical Zork adventure game, Return to Zork. To play this game I had to boot to MS DOS with a floppy disk, I could not just exit Windows 3.1. The reason for this was the memory in MS DOS was so tiny that I had to load the bare minimum possible into memory to have enough left to play the game. I would load the CD ROM driver, Mouse driver, Sound driver and try to eliminate anything else in the startup files that might take unnecessary space. Using this method I was able to play Under a Killing Moon, DOOM, QUAKE, and probably more games, but I can't remember other ones that I played growing up.