alt Hacker NewsI was teaching myself 8086 16-bit assembly a few nights ago on MS-DOS 5.0. It was so much fun getting a color block to display on CGA.
Nevertheless, writing system code in assembly was probably going to cause a lot of insomnia and other side effects, especially when Microsoft was far from the domination force on IBM PC.
The easy way to write assembler for a machine with no compilers is to write the code in C, get the algorithm right, then translate it to asm.