A bit OT - Urban Myths?
Michael Abbott
michael at araneidae.co.uk
Sun Jul 6 14:43:35 BST 2003
> Michael Abbott wrote:
> > "DOS addresses only 1 Megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any
> > applications needing more." --Microsoft, 1980, on the development of DOS.
>
> DOS could only access 1MB of RAM because the 8086 only had a 20 bit address
> bus.
Good point, I'd forgotten that. Indeed, the addressing architecture
didn't allow more than 20 bit addresses (plus the dreadful bit 21 hack
to cram in another 64K-16 bytes). Oh, the glory days of memory managers
and cramming resident applications into "high" memory.
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