Chuck Guzis declared on Wednesday 07 December 2005 20:26:
  keeping things like the DAA instruction intact
and supporting a bunch
 of do-nothing instructions like MOV DL,DL. 
 FYI, that most certainly doesn't just "do nothing."  It updates the flags
 based on the contents of the DL register, and you could do a conditional
 jump based on the results.
  Consider on Windows XP that you can still run the
following code:
        mov     cl,9
        mov     dx,offset HWMes
        call    5
        mov     cl,0
        call    5 
 Huh?  Do you mean this?
 MOV  AH, 9
 MOV  DX, HWMes
 INT  21h
 MOV  AH, 0
 INT  21h 
  No, he meant what he wrote.  It's the CP/M compatibility layer built into
MS-DOS.  Address 5 of the PSP (Program Segment Prefix) contains a long jump
to MS-DOS, and uses CL for the function code instead of AH.
  -spc (@#$@#!# thought I forgot my MS-DOS arcana ... )