First buttembly language encountershow to get started 560

I'd already been programming buttembler on other platforms for years before I first encountered a PC, so my view on this may be different, but I never thought the PC *itself* was so difficult. The I-O devices are well documented, and if you stick to the MDA for video, the memory mapped video isn't difficult to understand.

But as I say, the PC *itself* wasn't a big deal. The 8086 was another thing. It really was the first really odd archetecture I'd worked with. I've seen others since then, but being my first, it was a bit surprising, and took a while to get used to. And to this day, I *still* have to sometimes look up addressing modes.

Never seemed much worse (or better) than a lot of OS calls. Reminded me a bit of DG's RDOS, in fact. The part the I found annyoing was that you could encounter "features" which didn't work on all machines. What this usually meant was a time consuming check of BIOS documents (when you could find them) on various machiees to see what was portable or (more often) testing on multiple platforms to make sure whatever you used worked on most of them. Ralf Brown's interrupt list was a huge relief when it arrived.

- Bill