<story><title>A look at the die of the 8086 processor</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2020/06/a-look-at-die-of-8086-processor.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrlonglong</author><text>You gotta love that weird segmented memory model though, to allow it to address up to 1MB of RAM using 20 lines, combining a pair of 16 bit registers to generate the 20 bit address. The Motorola 680x0 was a bit saner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kabdib</author><text>I think that the face of computing would have changed quite dramatically if Intel had decided to make the x86 segment paragraph size 256 bytes (8 bits) instead of the useless 4 bits. Imagine not having a 640K (or 1MB) ceiling (without hacks like &amp;quot;expanded&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;extended&amp;quot; memory). It would not have been a big deal for Intel to do this; I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure they could have multiplexed four more pins worth of address lines.&lt;p&gt;It would have given the x86 a native 24MB address space, equal to the 68000&amp;#x27;s physically provisioned 24 bits (which is all most 68K systems supported anyway, certainly the Atari ST and the Mac).&lt;p&gt;For instance, in the mid 80s, VisiCorp was trying really, really hard to fit their products into 640K. They had some whizzy stuff, but the address space problem pretty much killed them. Later, Microsoft and IBM came along, did the disgusting memory-space hacks that plagued users for a decade or more, and VisiCorp foundered.</text></comment>
<story><title>A look at the die of the 8086 processor</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2020/06/a-look-at-die-of-8086-processor.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrlonglong</author><text>You gotta love that weird segmented memory model though, to allow it to address up to 1MB of RAM using 20 lines, combining a pair of 16 bit registers to generate the 20 bit address. The Motorola 680x0 was a bit saner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chihuahua</author><text>I wish Intel had just added some address lines and increased the price by $10 or whatever.&lt;p&gt;I remember writing 68k assembly code and it was very pleasant to work with. 8 address registers, 8 data registers, if you want to access memory, you just put a 32-bit address into an address register.&lt;p&gt;Then I read a book about 80286 assembly and though &amp;quot;ugh this is horrible&amp;quot; and never wrote a single line of x86 assembly code. Worrying about segments and memory models (tiny, small, medium, compact, large, huge) seemed like such a drag on programmer productivity.</text></comment>