[32bitkid]

I find stuff like this fascinating; I'm old enough to remember computers from this era, and—at least for me—I have a certain nostalgia for them. The first computer I was exposed to was an IBM PCjr, so seeing stuff like this 35 years after-the-fact is pretty mind-blowing, that people still care.

I know that a lot of it is just my age, and I remember my father growing up used to work on/rebuild the engine on his '64 VW beetle. I think for very similar reasons: nostalgia, limited complexity, the tangibility of the "API". For me, POKEing a value in memory and seeing the screen change or a sound play is tangible. The opcodes of an 8088 are _just_ enough that I can feel like I understand it. Modern computers feel several orders of magnitude more complex and—admittedly—more powerful, but at a _cost_. I'm sure my dad thought the same about electric fuel-injected engines and the ever increasing complexity of "modern" cars.

Currently, on my work-bench in the garage is a half-completed [Micro8088](https://github.com/skiselev/micro_8088) and 8-bit ISA back-plane; still waiting for a few parts to come in. Its been a lot of fun to work on, and the intent is to get back into doing some retro-programming. (Hopefully, I have a better understanding of the underlying architecture now than I did when I spent a summer when I was 14 trying to figure out the relationship between AH/AL and AX without a concrete understanding of binary/hexadecimal math)