My biggest assembly project is a program of 17,5kb in 8086. It's my SBASM cross assembler. Every extra cross adds about 3 to 4k to that. The crosses are written as overlays.
The biggest 8052 project was my frequency counter with SB-Bus interface, and it's size is 9,5kb.

But how do you define code size? If you add fancy menu's and screen layouts to your program, you can easily get large code sizes. The laser printer project that was mentioned probably contained 95% bitmaps and lookup tables. No wonder you get a code size of 230kb.