==Measure for measure==
The operating system took up 16k of memory - one ROM chip. BASIC took up another 16k chip. AMSDOS takes up 8k (the spare memory in its chip is taken up either by [[CP/M ]], [[Logo]] or by [[ParaDOS]]). So we have 40k of firmware in total: as big as most games, and a lot bigger than the 16k of [[Protext]].
Discounting BASIC, this is 24k of ready-written code that the machine code programmer can use. Why's this such a big deal?