[akira2501]

Then you look at the assembly for the old Cray-1 computers (octal opcodes) and the IBM System/360 computers (word opcodes), and you realize, they made it so amazingly simple you can mostly just write the opcode bytes and assemble by hand if you like.

Then x86 came along, without the giant budgets or the big purchasers, and so they made that assembly as efficient and densely packed as is possible; unfortunately, you lose what you might otherwise conveniently have on other machines.

[ScottBurson]

I've read somewhere that Seymour Cray used to write his entire operating system in absolute octal. ("Absolute" means no relocation; all memory accesses and jumps must be hand-targeted to the correct address, as they would have to be with no assembler involved.)

[bluGill]

x86 is the same if you stick to the origional 4bit subset. However it has been extended so many times that you can't find the nice parts.