{"id":471,"date":"2008-06-17T11:03:46","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T16:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=471"},"modified":"2008-06-17T12:13:24","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T17:13:24","slug":"30-years-of-x86","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/471\/30-years-of-x86","title":{"rendered":"30 Years of x86 on PC World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/id,146957-c,intel\/article.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img src='\/wp-content\/8086_30th.jpg' alt='30th Anniversary of 8086 \/ x86 Standard' class=\"alignright\" \/><\/a>Thirty years ago this month, Intel released the 8086 microprocessor, the originator of the now-famous x86 standard and the ultimate progenitor of most modern consumer CPUs.<\/p>\n<p>But what, exactly, does all that mean?  Well, think of it this way: any assembly language program written as far back as 1978 for the Intel 8086 will run, unmodified, on Intel&#8217;s latest Core 2 Extreme released in 2008 &#8212; only 180,000 times faster.<\/p>\n<p>The thirty-year tale of x86 began when an Intel engineer named Stephen P. Morse defined the 8086 instruction set (the core group of instructions that define what a microprocessor can do) while working at Intel in the late 1970s.  That same instruction set would go on to form the basis of the world&#8217;s most popular personal computer architecture.  Even the once-insular Macintosh platform, the last mainstream bastion of the non-Intel world, now runs on x86 processors.<\/p>\n<p><img src='\/wp-content\/morse_tiny.jpg' alt='Stephen P. Morse' class=\"alignleft\" \/>What&#8217;s going on here, and how did it get that way?<\/p>\n<p>PC World recently published <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/id,146957-c,intel\/article.html\" target=\"_blank\">a feature I wrote on the anniversary<\/a> that answers those questions, along with an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/id,146917-c,intel\/article.html\" target=\"_blank\">in-depth interview I conducted with Stephen P. Morse<\/a>, designer of the 8086 and the original x86 instruction set.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone interested in PC history, or how this standard came to be, should check them out.  For better or for worse, x86 is what we&#8217;re stuck with, so I feel that it is important for computer users to understand it.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you enjoy the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thirty years ago this month, Intel released the 8086 microprocessor, the originator of the now-famous x86 standard and the ultimate progenitor of most modern consumer CPUs. But what, exactly, does all that mean? Well, think of it this way: any assembly language program written as far back as 1978 for the Intel 8086 will run, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,32,21,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-interviews","category-news-current-events","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}