November 2, 2025
Press F to Interrupt
Ralf Brown's Files (The x86 Interrupt List)
The 8MB cheat sheet that made PC wizards — now a nostalgia riot
TLDR: A legendary 8MB text guide to old PC tricks is back in the spotlight, with veterans calling it essential and still useful. The comments turned into a nostalgia fest—dot‑matrix printouts, boot‑loader war stories, jokes about misspelling “interrupt,” and a debate over whether today’s devs rely too much on search.
If you ever wondered how old PCs learned their tricks, meet the cult classic that taught them: Ralf Brown’s x86 Interrupt List — nearly 8MB of plain text, a giant cheat sheet telling software how to talk to hardware. The comments section didn’t just nod, it burst into a standing ovation. One veteran proudly flexed a dot‑matrix printout he “used religiously in the 90s,” while another swore it’s still one of the most useful references. This isn’t just a list; it’s the dusty grimoire of early PC magic, the guide people used to write boot stuff that actually ran before Windows even woke up.
The hottest take? A user points out that Ralf “isn’t a specialist low‑level programmer,” and the crowd takes it as proof that back then curious users could build legendary resources — cue a light skirmish over whether modern devs are too pampered by search engines and AI. Nostalgia also turned hilarious: the page’s instructions to “right‑click Save As” in Internet Explorer and even Lynx (a text‑only browser) got meme’d as peak ’90s energy, and the many misspellings of “interrupt” became a running gag. Meanwhile, others got misty-eyed recalling boot loaders and VGA visual hacks, reminding everyone this list wasn’t trivia — it was survival. Bonus retro vibes: SourceForge links and a whisper of old‑school FTP for when the web misbehaves.
Key Points
- •The x86/MS-DOS Interrupt List (Release 61, 16 Jul 2000) compiles documented and undocumented PC interrupts, I/O ports, memory locations, and interfaces in nearly 8MB of ASCII files.
- •Downloads are provided in parts A–F with sizes, plus FAQ, a DESQview-specific excerpt (DVINT), and a PCI device info tool (RBpci).
- •System requirements include ZIP extraction and ASCII display; users are advised to use browser-specific save methods or FTP if downloads fail.
- •Contributed tools include RBILVIEW v2.1 (Win95/98 viewer); some HTML conversions exist but may lag the current release.
- •Ralf Brown’s related projects include CMU-EBMT (MT system), ZipRec (archive recovery), LA-Strings (language-aware strings), CanvasLMS.py (Canvas API), WordClus (word clustering), and SPAWNO (swapping spawn replacement).