Didn't knew it was called PC booters :blush: It came from old 80s computers C64 / Atari / Amiga, when software houses tried to protect from illegal copying. At times, hard drives were not much used for gaming. Things changed in the 90s, when HDD became cheaper and games installable. Or is this a DOS …

Depend on what kind of code one would make. ASM is required for drivers / kernel / bios dev / reverse engineering. But you can dev many things in Pascal, C, C++, Basic. To name a few !