Ralf Brown's Interrupt List or RBIL is a comprehensive list of interrupts, calls, hooks, interfaces, data structures, memory and port addresses, and processor opcodes for x86 for machines from the very start of the PC era in 1981 up into the year 2000, most of it still applying to PCs today as well. It covers operating systems, drivers, and application software; both documented and undocumented information including bugs, shortcomings, and workarounds, with version and date information, often at a detail level not found in the contemporary literature. A large part of it covers system BIOSes and internals of operating systems such as DOS, OS/2, and Windows, as well as their interactions.
The project is the result of the research and collaborative effort of hundreds of contributors worldwide over many years, and is maintained by Ralf Brown, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute.[1]
It has been a widely used resource by IBM PC system developers as well as application programmers in the pre-Windows era. As such it has proven to be an important resource in developing various open source operating systems, including Linux and FreeDOS.[2] Today it is still used as a reference to BIOS calls and to develop programs for DOS as well as other system-level software.
The list is currently at Revision 61 as of 17 July 2000, and is almost 8 MB in ASCII text[3], which would result in more than 2500 pages of condensed information when printed.