ABSTRACT
Preamble This could be an enormous chapter. I'm an electronic engineer, so the hardware is my forte, and I could keep writing for some time. However, the publisher only agreed to a book of around 400 pages, and I'm already pushing it! Very few assembly language books delve deeply into the hardware, and certainly no Windows books do. Well, many Windows programming books do cover, more or less, the CPU architecture and memory management, as I have done in Chapter 1. For systems programming, it is very helpful if you understand something about the hardware beyond the CPU, i.e., the other chips on the motherboard and plug-in cards, how they work together, and how to utilise them.
