I remember when

[sesame]

Johndowe,
That was a nice speech on the goodness of ASM.
I did some programming in my childhood... during my Diploma.
That was quite some time ago. I started reading this ebook on extensive programming in ASM... then lost interest and gave up. Thats because nobody cared about an ASM programmer anymore. I did some sool stuff with Basic in those ancient times though.:D Then I Jumped to C and VB... Javascript, Actionscript... so on.

Reading your thoughts, I think I will give it another try; since you say that ASM is so fundamental for programming. The book is called:
The Art of Assembly.

I still remember small fragments of programming...
PUSH CS
MOV DX,80H
INT 10H
JZ GETHDB
JB BOOTUP and such like :D