occipita

@mathlander - that article describes modern, standardized continental Europe style 9 pin. The variant played in America is likely to have been much more like the traditional English game of Skittles, which is very similar but typically has smaller lanes and lighter balls. Many British pubs have a Skittles lane out the back, particularly in the south west, but generally they're much smaller than the 19.5 metres suggested by the article you link.

Pretty sure I ran NT4 on an 8MB system at one point, although that would have been achieved by downgrading the memory after installation (I had a SIMM fail and couldn't get a replacement quickly), and as I always cut down on unnecessary services immediately after installation it probably wasn't a fair test. Similarly, I ended up using XP on a 40MB system for a while, which with enough services disabled was actually surprisingly usable.

"But object code produced by some early compilers, particularly for microcomputer platforms such as the PC, was unreasonably bad." -- anecdotal evidence: the first PC C compiler I worked with didn't track register contents between statements, so code like i = i+2; j = i - 1; would compile to mov ax, word [i] / add ax, 2 / mov word [i], ax / mov ax, word [i] / dec ax / mov word [j] ax.