[jmkb]

Lovely. I spent many an hour in DEBUG.EXE as a child.

Finding extra space for adding code, like the welcome message, was always fun -- although it would be better form to have the code zero out the "borrowed" bytes after the message is written, just in case. Sometimes it was necessary to rewrite the assembly to squeeze in a few more bytes, eg, zeroing a register using an XOR instead of a MOV command with a 0000 parameter.

One could save these patches as text files that were designed to be piped directly into DEBUG.EXE, and these could be distributed -- by floppy, BBS, or printout -- to other users of the same DOS version. This was also a common way to format and distribute assembly language source code, since anyone could use their local copy of DEBUG.EXE to assemble it.