interrupt 8086

An interrupt is the method of processing the microprocessor by peripheral device. An interrupt is used to cause a temporary halt in the execution of program. Microprocessor responds to the interrupt with an interrupt service routine, which is short program or subroutine that instructs the microprocessor on how to handle the interrupt.
There are two basic type of interrupt, maskable and non-maskable, non-maskable interrupt requires an immediate response by microprocessor, it usually used for serious circumstances like power failure. A maskable interrupt is an interrupt that the microprocessor can ignore depending upon some predetermined upon some predetermined condition defined by status register.The 80x86 chips allow up to 256 vectored interrupts. This means that you can have up to 256 different sources for an interrupt and the 80x86 will directly call the service routine for that interrupt without any software processing.
The 80x86 provides a 256 entry interrupt vector table beginning at address 0:0 in memory. This is a 1K table containing 256 4-byte entries. Each entry in this table contains a segmented address that points at the interrupt service routine in memory