Actually, it's interesting to see the minimum requirements for serious development work today. Many companies all but require you to have a CD-ROM drive to get access to the documentation, or to even install the software. Though most anything runs in 8 Mb of RAM now, it's pretty clear that 16 Mb or more will be needed in the near future for the more advanced OSs that are coming. I also firmly believe that you should pick your development language purely on business issues. I'm thrilled and amazed to see how in a matter of only a few years C has overtaken assembly as the language of choice for embedded systems, yet even now too many programmers continue to work in assembly simply because they know and love it.
Love has no place in business.
Damn shame, that. There are certainly many applications that demand assembly for raw horsepower reasons, but these are fewer each day. Even the lowly 8051 has fantastic C compilers that can rival a competent assembly programmer. We do know, though, that industry convention shows in most cases C programs are completed significantly faster and more accurately than those in assembly. This may not have been true even just a few years ago when compilers were not up to par, but it certainly is today.