Subj : Re: OT: horrible 8086 segmentation To : josef@invalid.invalid From : Charlie Gibbs Date : Tue Nov 26 2024 18:50:24 On 2024-11-26, Josef Möllers wrote: > On 25.11.24 18:33, mm0fmf wrote: > >> My eyes! My eyes! That was COMPACT model code, so 64k of code and 1MB of >> data, code addresses were 16bit offsets to the CS reg and data was far >> so 32 bits of segment and offset of DS or ES. And of course you had to >> be extra careful of any pointer arithmetic as a far pointer wrapped >> after 64k. You had to use slower HUGE pointers to get automatic >> normalisation. God it was shit. > > And to consider that, at that time, processors like MC68000 or NS32016 > were readily available. Which proves once again that a shitty design beats a good one if it's released first. Everybody was yapping about the 640K barrier. I was more concerned with the 64K barrier. I remember manually normalizing pointers everywhere, and if I wanted to work with a large arrays of structures I'd copy individual structures to a work area byte by byte so I didn't get bitten by segment wrap-around in the middle of a structure. As the joke goes, aren't you glad the iAPX432 died out? Otherwise a truly horrible Intel architecture might have taken over the world. -- /~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of \ / | growth is the ideology X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell. / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3) .