To get to the root of what Assembly is all about, you have to go back years and years. (cue wobbly visual effects). Let’s timewarp back to the late 80s, mullets have (thankfully) gone out of fashion and the Amiga and Atari ST are still battling it out to be the home computer kings. The humble PC is just starting to make its way into the home in the form of the 286, or if you were minted, the 386 with astonishing clocks speeds of 10MHz for the 286 and up to 33MHz for the 386 and of course, a whopping 2 or 4 Mb of memory, shared with the video of course…. Ahh, I miss those days of DOS…
Anyway, around this time there were a bunch of guys mucking around writing programs and demos in machine code and assembly languages. With the comparatively tiny amount of system memory actually available to use, programmers focused on optimizing code as much as possible to be able to achieve as much as possible using as few resources as they could. Of course, what with programmers being a feisty lot, friendly rivalries soon sprung up as to who could get the most out of the smallest memory use… and so, in 1992, a couple of these uber-geeks organized a meet in a school in Kauniainen, Finland to compare their work and have a bit of a competition with each other. This was to set the stage for Assembly, arguably now the largest meeting of computer fans this side of the Atlantic.
Each year, loads of progammers would try every trick in the book to get as much as possible out of their programs whilst using as little memory as possible. Why not take a look at last year's winner? Prepare to be stunned by what someone can do with just 4kb of memory. Oh, and before you cry out that the file is not 4kb, it's wrapped up as an .exe, so there!