After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.
And I did the same when was learning x86 protected mode and tried to do multitasking in assembler (was lucky in 1990s to randomly buy book in Russian [because programming books in English were more expensive back in the day in Latvia] about assembler, which had three parts - assembler for beginners, floating point stuff and protected mode).