Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to be the only person here to have weathered the entire evolution from 8008 on, for a living not as a hobby (though is both for me).

I am possibly approaching Senior Curmidgeon status, but I mean well. Even the early chips definitely required RTFM and some serious visualization chops, there are millions of bad and very bad things in a random poke, those two help you probe their borders instead of blue screening your brain. I see examples of ignoring both boasted about here. It's not lame to study before committing, and the needed info has never been secret. Please forgive me this, if you feel targeted. I am 70 years old, and am still doing this shit, on modern multicore 64 bit architectures, and would not be here without doing what I say. RTFM, run code in your head, when you got both start runnin the real thing. Short term nor for the impatient, but long term?

I wrote in ASM up to i286, and always had the specifications handly. Never poke around randomly executing nonsense code. Too easy to trash your HD, if you had one. Or find the real "Halt and Catch Fire". Messy. The books were easily avaiable, back to way before even the 4004, no excuse for not using them to run your probes in the virtual model of the chip implanted in your head from reading that book. The first experiments should then be in areas of confidence with valid data and no addressing violations. Steps, not f*it leaping off a cliff into clouds.

8080 was the last small space part, with only a total addressable 64K. I consider it the root of all evil, as it were, because it set the parameters for 64K limited program. All else flows from there because of the decision to maintain backward binary compatibility. So it was wrapped in redirectors and segment registers in an expanded 1M space, without any security or permissions management. Which would cost peanuts, a flag and some specific address decoder disables. Simple days.

I often took advantage of COM runtimes in those days. Often, and actually most usefully, without a DOS or RTOS between me and the metal. It was trivial to write a serial interface COM loader, and drop my FORTH into it for itelligent debugging. Or anything else, investigative or command.

The freedom started to go away with extra wrappers in 80286, which among other things intoduce "Real" and "Protected" execution modes, plus some extended native addressing modes. Starting to grow up, can still run 8008 COM code, but in that mode it sees only COM compatible register set, and has no access to the execution mode flag. Much "safer", sorta. Except still gets the 32 bit 808x indirect instruction address modes, if invoked in Real Mode.

Heard about "non-modal design"? 68000 got much closer. Every additional wrapper introduces large arrays of data re-routing and management logic. Needs a restart in design and philosopy. dropping COM support hardware and only allowing virtual machines to play is today's answer, getting closer, and much safer. And as core counts go up, have only latest clean architectures run on most cores, no wrappers, and a dedicated legacy core. Or chip. with FPGGA run time loadable architecture for that, agan no wrappers. But it may alreadt be too late. Too much investment that may get broken in amusing ways.

After the i286, the i386 on on to the present have foccussed more on speed and size of, and access to, Protected mode, runtimes, sharing memory, and verious support tricks. All carefully avoiding disturbing the ability to run by now ancient OS utities, buried deep in the underground of the OS. till WinNT, Win32, and the Pentium etc IIRC. Though I swear I still see several in the procces list on W7.