[userbinator]

Since the x86 family spans over 3 decades, and is almost completely backwards-compatible, it makes sense to start out at the beginning. The basic concepts don't change, and it's easier to see the rationale for a lot of things that would otherwise seem odd if you know the history behind it.

The latest PCs can still run DOS (often needed for BIOS updates), so the programs will still assemble and run. There is indeed a 640K limit, but even the 64K limit of a basic single-segment .COM file will seem like a huge amount to work with if you're just starting out with Asm; a "Hello World" program is around two dozen bytes. (Learning Asm really changes your perspective on things like efficiency - I've taught it to programmers who have only ever used high-level languages, and they are often surprised at the vast differences in scale. Ditto when showing them some nice 4k/64k productions from the demoscene.)

Then once you learn the basics, it's not so hard to go up to 32, then 64 bits, and Windows/Linux environments.