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wewewedxfgdf 9 hours ago  [ - ]

Don't know why you're being voted down - you're correct - segmented memory was an awful nasty complex way to program and the industry was eager to see the backside of it.

Why would someone be popping up in 2026 saying it was awesome? Weird.

peterfirefly an hour ago  [ - ]

It was awesome in the sense that it was a really, really good solution to the problem they had when the 8086 was being designed:

  * we want to stay 16-bit
  * we want to make porting extremely easy
  * we want to make gradual upgrading of people's programs to >64K easy
  * we want to work well with really small memories (so don't force people to use fat pointers all the time)
  * we don't want the typical (or max non-redundant) instruction to get too long
  * we don't want an MMU
  * we don't want complicated bank switching
  * we don't want long carry chains for all address generations
  * -- but we still want a gigantic address space (for the time it was designed)!