Re: Super Serial Card Question?

[Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com>]

"Paul R. Santa-Maria" <paulrsm@buckeye-express.com> writes:
> The IBM PC came out in 1982.

August 1981.  I don't remember what day, but my then-employer purchased
one from a local Computerland store on the day of introduction.  That
was when I got my first introduction to 8086 architecture (blecch!).

Fortunately the 386 introduced a much cleaner 32-bit flat addressing
model, and the Athlon 64 and Opteron [*] have done a good job of
extending it to a 64-bit model with more general registers.  There's
still a lot of legacy baggage for 8086 and 80286 in the chips, but if
you're writing new code that doesn't have to run on the pre-386 chips,
you can mostly ignore it.

Eric

[*] Oh, and Intel has some parts in which they've cloned the AMD 64-bit
instruction set, though they screwed up a few things.  Intel calls
their version EMT64 or some such thing.

Once upon a time, Andy Grove of Intel publicly quipped of AMD that "their
last original idea was to copy Intel."  The shoe is on the other foot now.