May 2024
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
14h 32m
English

“A computer on every desk” was Bill Gates’s ambition during the 32-bit era of the 1990s, and while the current trend is toward the Internet of Things and the cloud, a personal computer (PC) can still be found on many desks and laps today. The PC isn’t a single computer design; rather, it’s a set of loose conventions for combining many different components from different manufacturers into computers, based around the x86 family of CPUs.
Thanks to a business-led focus on backward compatibility, modern PCs retain many features from earlier stages of their evolution, so in this chapter we’ll study how these conventions came ...
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