[cameldrv]

The Turbo Pascal version of this was even better, because you could do a whole block of asm instead of just a single line at a time. As I remember there were annoying limitations in the C version around labels and such. It was incredibly useful when writing performance oriented code at that time because it was very easy to write code that would outperform the compiler.

[badsectoracula]

I'm pretty sure you could do asm blocks in Turbo C using brackets, e.g. asm { ... }, though it might have been a Turbo C++ thing (i never really used plain TC much).