It goes both ways too—just thinking about K&R C is enough to trigger the memory of the smell of the copy of K&R that I borrowed from one of my high school teachers which was imprinted with the smell of coffee and cigarettes (including a coffee ring on the front cover).
After reading that I now have a sudden craving for 4DOS and 4OS2.
I was young at the time and had “access” to a lot of amazing software packages that I’m still learning how amazing they were. Gotta wonder how things would be different if I didn’t give up on DESQView/X and decided to download Slackware one 1.44mb floppy at a time from a local BBS.
Except that writing a windowed DOS terminal emulator involves writing an entire VGA card emulator, likely a VGA BIOS, hooking a bunch of DOS routines.... probably a DOS extender too.
