PC intern
the encyclopedia of system programming
by Michael Tischer · first published 1996
3mentions
1recommended by
2HN commenters
2016–2022first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Dense reference on PC system programming for DOS-era hardware, covering BIOS and interrupts. It offers real code to learn from and suits programmers who want to understand low-level PC internals.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…but I think the ones that influenced me earlier are more important, so I'll stop there. Jim Butterfield: The very first programmer I looked up to. I learned a lot reading his code. Michael Tischer: PC Intern author. That book was very influential for me. I have this crazy drive to know how things work and that book explained a lot to me. Michael Abrash: My assembly language skills owed[0] a lot to his writing.…
on “Ask HN: Which hackers do you look up to the most?” ↗You would buy books like this one, https://www.amazon.com/PC-Intern-Encyclopedia-Programming-De... Borland debuggers were quite good.
on “Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat” ↗Before C and C++ became widely acceptable for game development, we used to read these bibles like these, https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book https://www.amazon.com/PC-Intern-Encyclopedia-Programming-De... https://www.amazon.com/Black-Art-Game-Programming-High-Speed... Very little regular C and C++ code, plenty of inline Assembly.
on “Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game” ↗