I follow the demoscene so I'm pretty familiar with the tiny-yet-featureful productions its produced, and yet the sizes on some of those binaries still somewhat surprises me --- an entire assembler is merely 6389 bytes! A "Hello World" compiled with GCC is roughly the same size ( http://timelessname.com/elfbin/ ). The DEBUG.COM debugger is 5450B, and the shell, COMMAND.COM, which contains 7 builtin commands, is merely 2576 bytes.
More amazing is the fact that the original developers probably weren't exerting great effort in size-optimising them either, unlike demoscene productions, and yet they're still extremely tiny.
More amazing is the fact that the original developers probably weren't exerting great effort in size-optimising them either, unlike demoscene productions, and yet they're still extremely tiny.