Re: It wasn't me!
I wrote a simple screen editor for MS-DOS 0.96 in EDLIN, creating a bunch of text files full of preudo-assembler commands that, when concatinated together and redirected into DEBUG, produced the editor as a .COM file. No need for linking with .COM files. Why? Curiosity, of course. I was learning the internals of a new OS program loader.
Primitive? Absolutely! But try to remember that DOS was tiny ... It ran from 160K floppies. Most early machines didn't have hard-drives, and if they did they were probably only 5 megs. DOS was mostly useless as a program loader, until ver. 3.1 enabled the networking hooks ... But it was a hell of a lot better than dragging card-decks to the glass house and waiting days for the result!
As a side-note, I had already been using UNIX for several years (BSD on DEC, mostly) when the IBM-PC came out. We looked at each other & asked "What is IBM thinking? Thank gawd/ess it can't do networking!" ... the rest, as they say, is history.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
