I was visiting Ward Christensen on the day he got his first Toshiba laptop. After he got it powered up he realized that he had zero software on the 3 1/2" disks it used, making it almost useless.

It did have MS-DOS, thus it had debug. He used debug to write an impromptu assembly program to pull across data from one of his other machines via serial cable. He then used that code to pull across xmodem, which was then enough to pull across Qmodem. Then he pulled across laplink and he had rull access to everything.

It took less that 20 minutes total, I think.