Some years ago, I was in the "Barbecue party", a famous French Coding-Party, near Chambery.
We were some dozens of geeks, there.

• The ones with their Amigas,
• The ones with their Ataris,
• The one with his Mac
• me and my friends with some Acorn computers
• The Linux geeks
• The windows95 coders
• And the MS-DOS Demo makers.

This w/u is about the latter as they actually amazed me, not only technically speaking.
Imagine the stupidest architecture (640k limit, 16 bit addressing, 4 registers). Imagine the cheapest machines (286, 386)...
And look what the Hell they did :

• Demoes, of course, but this is not my point
• Games. Complete games. You might have tried Wolfenstein 3D on a 286 and found it quick and playable? Imagine a Doom-like on the same machine.
• Network applications including a web browser
• Windowing systems
• etc.

All in either assembler or in (Borland) Turbo-Pascal.
I then asked them at what they'd aim all this as Linux was coming and already running on almost as affordable machines.
They explained me that, because of Redmond technological inflation, that make people buy a newer computer every 1 or 2 years, there are more and more old garbaged computers every year...
And despite Microsoft's statistics, according to which there are hundreds of millions people using Windows, there are also billions people who'd be happy to collect these prehistorical computers.
These guys are smart because:

• They enjoy what they do
• They also do something useful
• They share what they do.

You too: you can help.
See also "Idiot DOS Programmers"