Comment by themafia

Wow. Virtual86 modes, the floating point unit, and memory paging really created an explosion of complexity within the microcode.

There's sort of a wild west nostalgia that came with the 8086 and 8088 chips and a sense of approachable individual adventure that came along with it. Staring into the 386 is like staring into the cold and dispassionate industrial machine future that Fritz Lang was trying to portray in Metropolis.

Still fun to look at though. Great post.