In assembly language, communication with different hardware devices is done through what's called interrupts.
An interrupt is a signal to the processor sent by the hardware or software indicating that there's something happening or there is a message to be delivered. The processor suspends its current running process, saving its state, and executes a function called an interrupt handler to deal with this interrupt. Interrupts have their own notation and are widely used to communicate with hardware for sending requests and dealing with their responses.
There are two types of interrupts. Hardware interrupts are generally used to handle external events when communicating with hardware. Software interrupts are caused by software, usually by calling a particular instruction. The difference between an interrupt and an exception is that exceptions take place within the processor rather than externally. An example of an operation...
