Comment

Comment by senfiaj

>> 8086 can't address 2MB of memory

This was just for illustration, not claiming that actual 8086 does this.

>> Raymond Chen talks a bit about how it worked in Windows 3.x here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20171113-00/?p=97...

And this is the problem, it was very painful just to walk through a 200 KB buffer. This required compiler/runtime tricks, different selector increments in real vs protected mode, and special pointer types. Paging later made this kind of thing look like one flat array, a thing segmentation could not: making non-contiguous physical RAM appear contiguous to the program.

parent senfiaj 4 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton