Wow, NASM is really a blast from the past for me. 80386 assembly was my second "language" that I learned, after various forms of BASIC (on TRS-80 and QuickBASIC). In the mid-90's I was a teenager, and would write most of my code in QuickBASIC, and make optimized code in NASM. QuickBASIC was a compiled BASIC, but still pretty slow on a 386, so about half of my code base ended up being assembly.

At one point, I made my own pseudo-language, which was actually just a few dozen commands that would be translated into NASM, to make programming in assembly much easier to deal with. I ran out of room on my 40mb hard drive, and also ran out of backup floppies that worked (I would 3x backup my important stuff, because the mid-90's was a terrible time for reliable magnetic media on a budget), so I would periodically delete source code that I had spent weeks programming. The interpreter was one of those casualties, which, thinking back, was a really dumb move (I was 15 or so, cut me some slack!), because I still kept a lot of programs that needed that interpreter to compile. I have those codebases to this day, and can run the executable on my retro DOS machines, view the code, but no compilation :-(

I can't remember what my old assembler was, but I do remember NASM was a dream compared to whatever other assembler I was running at the time. I'm happy to see that it is still kicking.

In case anyone is wondering why I would be running a 386 in the mid 90's with a 40mb hdd (and 1mb RAM!), it's just because my parents had the time had no money, and to them a computer was a computer - they couldn't see the advantage of 1mb vs 16mb of RAM, people in general were much less computer savvy. It wasn't until my 30's that my mother realized that my time programming computers as a teenager was actually something productive!