[pedrolins]

I find it very interesting that you mention looking at the history of ISA's first in order to understand the current iteration of the technology.

I was reading the RISC-V privileged ISA recently and the amount of seemingly arbitrary registers and behaviours that must be implemented to support a UNIX-like OS is crazy, and that got me thinking about the history behind all of these things that the hardware must support in order to support the OS.

But thank you for the pointers, I'll definitely use this.

[swetland]

The "ISA" mentioned above is the "Industry Standard Architecture", the 8/16bit bus used by PCs and PC clones back in the day, not "Instruction Set Architecture (x86, ARM, RISC-V, etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

[phendrenad2]

Not that ISA: :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

[justsomehnguy]

Ha! I definitely meant ISA bus, as others had mentioned.

Kudos to swetland and phendrenad2!