CMMI Distilled : A Practical Introduction to Integrated Process Improvement

For some time, developing software for this platform (and others) meant developing custom software. Commercial components were simply not available. While this situation was not particularly conducive to productivity (it seemed the first step of each project in those days was to create a systems services layer), it was a comfortable situation for developers. Once you had mastered the DOS and BIOS interfaces, and had a comfortable understanding of 8086/8088 assembler (or a higher-level programming language), there were not many surprises.