Forst’s broad overview of the technical details of the IBM PC family includes clones and 386-based computers. It covers both hardware and system software (such as DOS), although the treatment is slightly heavier on the hardware side. Out of 33 chapters, 17 are on hardware, 12 are on software, and 4 deal with middle ground such as data types. The aim of the book is to explain the technical concepts that one must understand in order to be develop hardware or software for the PC family. In doing this, the book presents many of the details that are also found in manuals such as the official Intel documentation on the 8088, 8086, 8087, 80286, 80287, 80386, 80387, and 80486 microprocessors, and the IBM PC technical reference manual. The book does not cover enough of these details to serve as a hardware development or programming manual for the IBM PC family, however.
The book does a good job of explaining details of the PC bus, DMA channels, memory layout, interrupt vectoring, DOS organization, disk, keyboard and video control, serial and parallel port details, and the structures of .EXE and .COM files. Forst presents the evolution of the Intel microprocessors and covers the architectural differences in detail. He gives programming examples for a few key subjects such as assembly language programming of the 80387 numeric coprocessor, programming for the OS/2 Presentation Manager, and some graphics algorithms for the EGA video adapter. The PC family’s system software is described through OS/2. Note that the recently popular Microsoft Windows 3.0 is not mentioned.
This book is fairly thick; however, such an ambitious work is necessarily so. It can be used as a starting point for tracking down the answer to a technical question about the IBM PC family. If it does not contain the answer, it lists a few key references where the answer might be found. It does not contain many references to the popular literature (such as PC Magazine), however.
A good, detailed index is provided. The table of contents, at ten pages, is also detailed. The book is so well illustrated that the front matter includes a four-page list of illustrations and an eight-page list of tables.
The book originally appeared in Danish with a 1988 copyright date as PC principper, and it has been translated into English in this 1990 edition. The translation was apparently done by the author. His writing style is generally clear, although it does occasionally seem to have a foreign accent.
The author mentions in the preface that he typeset the book himself using a PC and TEX. It appears that the text was printed from laser printer output (rather than typesetter output). Other than the typesetting, the printing quality of the book seems good, although my copy had a mangled page that must have been torn and improperly folded between the printing and binding stages of production.
The book could conceivably be used as a class text in combination with a hardware or software lab activity. No exercises are given, however, and they, as well as laboratory guidelines, would have to be provided by the instructor. This book does a good job of bringing together information about the structure of the IBM PC hardware and system software. It does a nice job of explaining how it all works, with enough details to give an accurate view of the technology.
