[Tutor] OT What's next

[Terry Carroll]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, R. Alan Monroe wrote:

> > Pure assembler on a PC involves a huge amount of work for even
> > the most trivial task.
> 
> Some useful assembly tips here:
> http://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm

I never wanted to actually program assembly on the PC, but I did want to
understand it (actually, I wanted to understand the Intel x86
architecture, and there's no better way of doing that than learning the
assembly language for a machine).  I read Jeff Duntemann's "Assembly
language Step-by-Step,"  http://duntemann.com/assembly.htm , and found it
very useful, although I didn't actually try any programming.

I'm an old mainframe assembler language hack from way back in the IBM
System/370 days (although in my last development job, I wrote more in
machine code than in actual assembler), so I didn't really need or desire
to do the practical aspects of actually writing x86 code; but I felt that
would have been a good book to get me there, had that been what I wanted.

A couple of years ago, I took a course in which I built a rudimentary
computer around an Intel 8031 chip; and when I say "built," I mean built.  
It was a couple dozen components on a breadboard, with about only about
2Kbytes of memory, if I recall; I soldered or wire-wrapped every
connection.  You really learn an architecture when you do that.  not that
I remember much of it anymore, two years later.  Not a route I recommend.  
I needed a few credits to fill an obscure educational requirement, though,
and this was a fun way to do it.