I have been looking at PC assembler in a very superficial way just lately, but I found the work I have done on 6502 ASM helps me massively in understanding the base concepts. I especially see the things which the x86 introduced that were amazing improvements to the 6502 way of doing things. Not least data,code and stack segments along with a proper hardware stack. It suddenly struck me how much of a culture shock it must have been back in the mid eighties when the first 1/286's and so forth came on the scene. I wondered what you chaps thought who were more heavily involved in hardware modding and software programming than I was at the time?
Probably it seemed a bit distant as PC's were unthinkably expensive and focussed on business. Still it must have been a fascinating time. Did you mentally write-off the threat the PC posed to Atari or could you tell there was a new world opening up? I am particularly interested to know what programmers thought of the opportunities offered by the new 16bit hardware?