[RiderOfGiraffes]

I was 17 1/2. It was 1979, it was a TRS-80 with a whole 16KB of memory and a Z80 running at 1.77 MHz.

After two months I got fed up with how slow it was and wrote a compiler. It was written in BASIC and compiled itself. In the 16KB I fitted the BASIC source, two copies of the compiled version, and the tape saving program.

I think the compiler was 3810 bytes ...