I think 'easy to write assembly code for them' might be stretching it a little bit. Some instructions were pretty complex and I would expect be quite hard to use in practice.

What is certainly true is that a single instruction could do a lot, making for much more concise code than would be the case for RISC code.

IBM S/360 is probably the most influential CISC architecture. There is lots of S/360 documentation online. If of interest I did a short post on S/360 assembly a little while ago.

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/writing-ibm-s360-assemb...

Thanks but your link has a brief into paragraph followed by an input box to subscribe to your newsletter and by the time I made it to there I was interrupted by an obnoxious pop up prompt to again sign up for the newsletter. Is there a reason to be this aggressive? It's hard to believe this is a successful strategy. If someone enjoys your content they will sign up after they've actually been able read the article. Who signs up for a newsletter before they've even been able to read the first paragraph? I didn't bother with the rest of your link after this.

Thanks for letting me know. It’s a Substack thing not something I’ve chosen to do - I’ve tried to see if I could could turn off all pop-ups in the past without success. I didn’t know it was quite that bad so will have another look and possibly feedback to Substack.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that this was your choice. It was a general rant against the sorry state of these platforms that get in the way of the very product they are supposed to be promoting. It sounds like content I would be very interested in. Do you have a blog or somewhere else where this content also lives? Cheers.

I actually owe you a huge thank you for pointing out how bad the experience was!

I genuinely had no idea how awful it was - of course you don't see pop-ups if you are logged in. To be fair to Substack the control to turn off pop-ups was there but it was turned on by default and a bit buried away in the UI.

I've removed any mid-article calls to action and turned off pop-ups now so hopefully a much better and less aggressive experience.

On the S/360, the article I linked too was a short look at how complex some S/360 instructions were and at how assembly used to be written using pen and paper. If you're interested in more on S/360 Assembly then the principles of operation may be worth a scroll through.

Thanks again - really appreciate that you fed back rather than just closing your browser window.

[1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0_360Prin...

Great little article. My image of CISC was "complex addressing modes," not something as complex as the EDIT instruction.

Thanks - really appreciate that. S/360 is something else!

Yes, with CISC instructions and powerful macro assemblers like TASM and MASM.