Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?
That's a great question. Back in the day (late 70s & early 80s) I wrote assembly code on a Zilog z80 microprocessor. Life was good, but very limited. Zilog had announced the Z80k and that looked promising. Especially with the amount of memory available and how it was addressed. Zilog's approach was very much like Motorolas and I figured either one would come out on top. I never expected Intel to surface & dominate.
The company I worked for was stuck on IBM (nobody has been fired for buying IBM gear being the theory) and I took some training in 8086 architecture and coding. It didn't take long to realize that the original x86 indirect way of addressing memory would lead to many bugs. Segment and offset being used to reach into memory. At that time I decided to drop out of writing assembly language and went to C for stability reasons.
I did have to get back into assembly language and since I learned Intel's 8080 code way back then it was easy to get into the flow of things. Memory addressing has improved and you have much more processor to work with. That said, I think Intel's early x86 architecture cost me many late nights and probably 10 years of my life. Between that and windows reboot time I probably would be 20 years younger. :-)