"And a co-worker of mine about 14 years ago (The famous Jeff Johnson with whom I worked and created the also famous, in DOS days, XTREE file manager program) ..."

Sorry for getting a bit of topic, but: You are one of those guys??? It's just ... WOW! I feel kind of honoured to know persons like you. :-)
I started programming around '91/'92. I was aged 11 and looking back I can say that I was very lucky that my father bought an 80286 instead of a Nintendo. I always wondered who where the people who created these "system-near" tools like file managers. Without a medium like the internet it was a hard way to learn all the stuff. Later, when I had a lot of knowledge about DOS, Windows 95 showed up, and PC-programming with the API became boring ...

Yeah, those were the days ...
Jörg