This article first appeared on this date in O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com online publication. The content was deleted sometime in 2019 but I was lucky enough to find a copy in the WayBack Machine. I reformatted the text to fit the style of this site and fixed broken links, but otherwise the content is a verbatim reproduction of what was originally published.
The i386 architecture is full of cruft required to maintain compatibility with old machines that go back as far as the 8086 series.