My cousin set up a company supplying bespoke software to, among others, the oil industry, he had most of the code written by people in Poland because with the Eastern bloc's primitive machme memory was scarce so they were practised at writing compact code, less memory means less to go wrong. Soft errors from Alpha particles banging into a RAM memory cell.
I recall a colleague tearing his hair out on an Intel 8008 based encoder, EPROM came on cards of 2 K bytes, his code was 2 bytes more than a 2 K boundary and there was no space in the rack for another card. He got there in the end.
), directly in Z80 machine code (none of that soppy assembler stuff!), but initially within the constraints of 8k total available RAM (total for application' and workspace), plus 2K EPROM for the 'OS' - so 'efficient code' was absolutely essential. A year or two later I upgraded to 16k RAM (still static, hence power hungry) and ultimately to 32k of dynamic RAM!
