[Gllug] 4G Memory Restriction

[Christian Smith]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Alain Williams wrote:

>
>The 68000 series would have been a far better choice for the IBM PC than
>the intel chip where you had to work around the monstrous issues of a paged
>architecture. Unfortunately IBM was into producing something cheap.


A paged architecture would have been a god send. Unfortunately, the x86
had a segmented architecture, and not a good implementation at that. There
is nothing inhenrently wrong with paged or segmented architectures, or
even mixtures. It's just that the x86 did it all wrong until the i386 made
it a non-issue.

In fact, it was the software on top of the x86 segmentation that caused
the problems. A properly written 8086 application with a proper OS beneath
it should have run unchanged on the i286 and i386 and above. All it needed
was for Intel to have some sort of privilage mode, and the DOS 640K issue
could have been prevented <sigh>.

</pedant>

Christian

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