[Rerarom]

You are right, but this is something that is not usually emphasized. I think I could have been persuaded back then that with enough cleverness you could write printf out of if's and while's :)

Also, some years ago I even thought -- but not consciously -- that you could implement preemptive multitasking just from software (you can do it trivially via emulation, but it's slow and most importantly it's not what happens in actual OSes, where the code you write is the actual code that runs on the CPU). I think when I began reading about assembly and OS development, I was expecting the solution to appear at some point. But again, I was not aware of it (the moment I became, I realized how absurd it was), so I got disappointed in assembly without even knowing why.