That is one thing that was nice about DOS, you where close to the machine. I nev... | Hacker News

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jmclnx on June 4, 2025 | parent | context | favorite | on: Machine Code Isn't Scary

That is one thing that was nice about DOS, you where close to the machine. I never fully got machine language, but it was fun trying.

IIRC, debug.com could be used to create programs using machine lang.

pjmlp on June 4, 2025 [–]

Yes, it was a quite bare bones experience when compared to TASM and MASM, and only worked for COM executable, but it did work.

The reasoning being that COM files were a plain memory dump starting at offset 100H, thus you would type the code in memory and then dump it.

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