Obligatory quote from "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal":

Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory -- it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten.)

http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers