Awesome article Ken, I feel spoiled! It's always nice to see your posts hit HN!

Out of curiosity: Is there anything you feel they could have done better in hindsight? Useless instructions, or inefficient ones, or "missing" ones? Either down at the transistor level, or in high level design/philosophy (the segment/offset mechanism creating 20 bit addresses out of 2 16-bit registers with thousands of overlaps sure comes to mind - if not a flat model, but that's asking too much to 1979 design and transistor limitations I guess) ?

Thanks!

Thanks for publishing your blog! The articles are quite enlightening, and it's interesting to see how semiconductors evolved in the '70s, '80s and '90s. Having grown up in this time, I feel it was a great time to learn as one could understand an entire computer, but details like this were completely inaccessible back then. Keep up the good work knowing that it is appreciated!

A more personal question: is your reverse engineering work just a hobby or is it tied in with your day to day work?