On The Pink Shirt Book

Sun, April 9, 2006 - 9:12 AM PST

I've been battling through Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC for a while now - I say battling because it was written for a 386 running DOS and the closest thing I have is a Pentium II running Linux, so the examples and explanations can be challenging to run, modify, and understand on my own. And because it's more of a curious interest of mine rather than something that I'm researching for a project. So yeah, battling. But overall, I have to say that I understand why it got so much praise in the late '80s. I can also say that I prefer RISC designs.

But anyways, most people's eyes glaze over when they see the book or when they ask me what I'm reading and I tell them a little bit about it. But a few times now, people have actually recognized it as the "pink shirt" reference from the movie Hackers. That makes me happy.