Category Archives: 8086/8088

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VII: 8087 Intricacies

The other day I investigated a report that a C runtime library modification causes programs to hang on a classic IBM 5150 PC with no math coprocessor. The runtime originally contained two separate routines, one to detect the presence of … Continue reading

Posted in 8086/8088, Development, IBM, Intel, PC history, x87 | 10 Comments

Does (E)IP Wrap Around in 16-bit Segments?

The 8086/8088 is a 16-bit processor and offsets within a 64K segment always wrap around. If a one-byte instruction at offset FFFFh is executed on an 8086, execution will continue at offset 0. This is simply a consequence of the … Continue reading

Posted in 386, 8086/8088, Intel, x86 | 9 Comments

The IBM PC, 41 Years Ago

No, the OS/2 Museum does not have either a time machine or difficulty doing basic math. As of this writing, it is August 2021 and the IBM PC was announced in August 1981, 40 years ago. But in August 1980, … Continue reading

Posted in 8086/8088, BIOS, DOS, IBM, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 60 Comments

Undocumented 8086 Opcodes, Part I

This is a guest post by Raúl Gutiérrez Sanz This multi-part document is about undocumented 8086 processor opcodes and their behavior. Most of the document will likely apply to the 8088 processor as well, but this has not been verified. … Continue reading

Posted in 8086/8088, Intel, Undocumented | 13 Comments

Undocumented 8086 Opcodes

A minor mystery recently surfaced while analyzing DOS boot sectors. DOS uses several criteria when deciding whether a boot sector contains a valid BPB, and one of the criteria is (oddly enough) checking whether the first two bytes of the … Continue reading

Posted in 8086/8088, Documentation, Intel, x86 | 62 Comments