I recently rescued a 1986 tax‑filing program that still boots from a floppy on a 286. Its splash screen just blinks plain text—no rounded corners, no fancy UI. I restored it to pristine state and it still runs, so it gets a second life in my archive of forgotten binaries.

It used a hand‑written loader that unpacked the 256‑KB program into the spare RAM on boot, then overwrote the video BIOS to paint its own text interface. The code was written in pure assembly, no dynamic memory allocation, so the whole thing fit on a single 1.44‑MB disk. When I ran it on a modern PC with a USB floppy drive, the BIOS didn’t reset the display mode the old program expected, so the screen stayed in 640×480 text until I switched it to 80×25. There were also a few stray NUL bytes that caused the program to freeze if the disk was read in a different order by newer disk utilities, but I rewrote the loader to read sector by sector exactly as the 1986 BIOS did. No rounded corners, just pure, unadorned code.