Ralf Brown's Interrupt List
Wikimedia list article
Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (aka RBIL, x86 Interrupt List, MS-DOS Interrupt List or INTER) is a comprehensive list of interrupts, calls, hooks, interfaces, data structures, CMOS settings, memory and port addresses, as well as processor opcodes for x86 machines from the 1981 IBM PC up to 2000 (including many clones), most of it still applying to IBM PC compatibles today. It also lists some special function registers for the NEC V25 and V35 microcontrollers.
Overview
The list covers operating systems, device drivers, and application software; both documented and undocumented information including bugs, incompatibilities, shortcomings, and workarounds, with version, locale, and date information, often at a detail level far beyond that found in the contemporary literature. A large part of it covers system BIOSes and internals of operating systems such as MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows, as well as their interactions.
It has been a widely used resource by IBM PC compatible system developers, analysts, as well as application programmers in the pre-Windows era. Parts of the compiled information have been used for and in the creation of several books on systems programming, some of which have also been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Russian. As such the compilation has proven to be an important resource in developing various closed and open source operating systems, including Linux and FreeDOS.
The project is the result of the research and collaborative effort of more than 650 listed contributors worldwide over a period of 15 years, of which about 290 provided significant information (and some 55 of them even more than once). The original list was created in January 1985 by Janet Jack and others, and, named "Interrupt List for MS-DOS", it was subsequently maintained and mailed to requestors on Usenet by Ross M. Greenberg until 1986. As of October 1987, it is maintained by Ralf D. Brown, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Information from several other interrupt listings was merged into the list in order to establish one comprehensive reference compilation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2349048. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 2000, 1985 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralf Brown's Interrupt List” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.