Regarding your PS, I used Borland's Turbo C++ 1.0, and I think you've forgotten that memory models existed. Honestly, that's a good nightmare to forget.
I hated that about DOS, real-mode and BC++. After about 6-8 months of that misery, installing linux and learning to write C code with GCC was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt like an animal being released from a cage and into the wild.
In those days MS-DOS, Linux was barely usable, when Linux became usable Windows 95 was already around, without those limitations.
My first kernel was 1.0.9 released alongside Slackware 2.0, offering initial support for IDE CD-ROM drives and experimental support for ELF files, by the way.