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Comment by fsmv | Hacker News Reader

You can teach 8086 assembly which is still compatible with modern x86 and it only has like 20 instructions. It's lots of fun I made a whole bootable text editor an assembler and an almost finished lisp interpreter too.

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I think the 8086 has 117 instructions. It is a good example of a CISC, after all, with instructions like the one capable of copying a C string: REPNZ MOVSB.

While I have seen many claims that the 8086 has more than 20 thousand instructions that is very silly. By the same criteria any RISC with fixed 32 bit instructions would have 4 billion of them.

Yeah, though the concept of segmented memory access can be confusing and so far hasn't been very useful this century. :-)

64kb is a lot when you’re hand coding assembly. You just assemble to a .com file and pretend segments don’t exist.

Sure, but one of the fun things you'll want to do from assembler is put pixels or characters on the screen. They're memory mapped outside of segment 0, so you'll need to work with segments to do that.

I think Linux uses it to implement thread-local storage.

No, not really. A couple of features of the architecture and instruction encoding which were historically used for segmentation remain on amd64, and these features are used to implement thread-local storage on every mainstream os targeting the arch, but amd64 is not a segmented architecture in any meaningful sense.

Yeah we learned x86 assembly at my school too. We had to make a “database” (basically a flat file), complete with a text-based ui.

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