Intel 80386, part 1: Introduction

Raymond Chen is such a joy to read. I’m old and jaded enough to have very mixed feelings about Microsoft but it’s obvious they’ve had some very talented programmers over the years.<p>If I didn’t get enough pleasure from using Microsoft software over the years as I did from other OS’s I certainly made up for it reading stories from MS folk like Raymond.<p>As always a great and informative read!

See also the second and third installment:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20190122-00&#x2F;?p=100755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20190122-00&#x2F;?p=...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20190123-00&#x2F;?p=100765" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20190123-00&#x2F;?p=...</a>

<i>The 80386 is unusual in that it supports multiple calling conventions</i><p>It&#x27;s unusual to speak of a processor as &quot;supporting&quot; <i>any</i> calling convention, given that they are simply a convention compilers may follow. The CPU doesn&#x27;t care (and in the case of the 386 which has no return address prediction or special stack handling, it <i>really</i> doesn&#x27;t matter) about such things as functions or procedures either, as you&#x27;ll quickly realise if you read good optimised handwritten Asm.<p><i>Instruction encoding is highly irregular.</i><p>It looks very regular in octal:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dabo.de&#x2F;ccc99&#x2F;www.camp.ccc.de&#x2F;radio&#x2F;help.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dabo.de&#x2F;ccc99&#x2F;www.camp.ccc.de&#x2F;radio&#x2F;help.txt</a>

For x86 information, I really enjoyed Xeno Kovah&#x27;s OpenSecurityTraining courses for Intro and Intermediate x86. Recording quality is a bit spotty, but their whole YouTube channel is filled with great content.

My first owned PC, a 386SX at 20 MHz, quite a departure from the PCW 1512 at school computer club or the Timex 2068 at home.<p>However I still kept a bit of envy from my friends having fun with their Amiga 500s.

Personally I was looking forward to an intro to TSR programs :)

I wonder if when these processors were developed, from a hardware standpoint, did the engineering team contemplate Turing completeness and the theory of computation, or just try to satisfy a set of perceived customer needs.