[jerf]

"... art package for an obscure computer -> wrote my own assembler... port LCC... linker..."

Sir, you have one very well-shaved yak there [1]. Excelsior!

In other news, I sometimes see people bemoaning losing the "easy programming" that the era putatively had. I sometimes wonder if time has simply faded the scars of a world in which that's the sort of thing that might realistically happen. The era made some moderately difficult things easy (people mostly seem to miss the ability to slam pixels on the screen), and everything else really, really freaking hard, including many things we'd call easy today.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html