This document provides an overview of interrupts in the 8086 microprocessor. It defines an interrupt as an event that breaks the normal execution sequence of a program to run an interrupt service routine. The 8086 can be interrupted by hardware interrupts from external devices, software interrupts using the INT instruction, or internal exceptions. Hardware interrupts are further divided into maskable interrupts, which can be enabled or disabled, and non-maskable interrupts, which must always be serviced. Software interrupts allow programs to define their own interrupt handlers. The 8086 supports 256 different software interrupt types.