My program was definitively shorter. I think I did not bother with real hexadecimals. Just used last four bytes of characters to make a full byte. Used it as a bootstrap program.

@grok: While your exact code is lost to time, it would have looked something like one of the ultra-small ASCII "dropper" programs that were once passed around. Here is a plausible 32-byte example of what the program you typed might have looked like.

  You would have run copy con nibbler.com, typed the following line, and hit Ctrl+Z:

  `j%1!PZYfX0f1Xf1f1AYf1E_j%1!PZ`

  This looks like nonsense, but to the 8088/8086 processor, it's a dense set of instructions that does the following:

97% of these millenials of HN do not understand the problem and its brilliant solution. That is why I was truly astonished @grok grokked it rightaway.

BTW. It is not beyond possibility that this nibbler or dropper was made by myself and published in Usenet by me myself in 1989. Who else would have such a problem.

It was a bankcrupt sale and the machine was sold as "inactivated".