"The PC register on the 8088 points to the next instruction to be fetched - often pointing past the address of the currently executing instruction. In fact, the

"The PC register on the 8088 points to the next instruction to be fetched - often pointing past the address of the currently executing instruction. In fact, the IP 'register' you may be familiar with is not a real register at all - the value of IP is produced as needed from PC by subtracting the length of the instruction queue from PC." Dashing my childhood worldview against the rocks again, Intel.