"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:54:48 +0100, geoff wrote:
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

Sheet of paper and a crayon. Oh, and a chewable reference manual.

The reference manuals not much good when it hasn't been written yet.

Or when the devices don't actually do what's in the book because they suffer
from ground bounce inside the package.

Or even have leaky silicon so the bias drifts over time until the device
stops working. Or at least stops working until you power it off and get it
sent back as a faulty unit only for it to be fully functional when you try
and find the problem.

Then there are little things like actually connecting microprocessors to
hardware which are never in the manuals. Just little things like setup and
hold times, the odd race condition, etc. Things geof doesn't even know
exists.

hell, even things nobody knows about and you just have to find it and fix
it.