I hope that young man found some good hardware programming reference books. http://shiftleft.com/mirrors/utzoo-usenet/
@ellenor2000 @th not intended as such ! That's just what I understood from @th 's message, and supposed from newsgroup's audience at the time.
@th > having programmed 68k before
legends are certainly forged in the fires of the Sinclair QL
@th
I had Rector & Alexys' The 8086 Book (1980), Peter Norton's Inside the IBM PC (1986), and an Intel databook that was as thick as a phone book and printed on what appeared to be thin newsprint and had every 808x peripheral chip they made (8254 timer, 8259 PIC, etc.).
The manual that came with my dads' IBM-PC had the BIOS listing printed in the back.
Did this Linus character live in a cave?
@th It seems so polite...for him.
@th The way I solved it was by requesting the 8529 data sheet from my local electronics dealer. They sent it to me in the mail, free of charge.
@th I love that it even though it's a cry for help, it still has a cutting word for a piece of tech he loathes. That's our Linus.
@th Is it bad that I am fully aware of and somewhat knowledgeable about each of the specific things referred to in that post? (Especially the A20 line. Yes, it is very weird and confusing and one of the best/worst examples of how kludged the PC architecture is.)
Also I never would've guessed that Linus started on 68k before transitioning to the PC.
@micheal65536 @th yes, yes it's good. it's important to know the details through the foundations.
@th datasheet. the name you want is datasheet. these were not so easy to find before search engines.
@th I'm guessing no one answered?