Re: [OM] More Memory (OT)

[Chuck Norcutt]

And all of the programmers of the world are thankful they didn't.  The 
i486 couldn't support more than 4GB of physical memory but (if it were 
implemented) could support a virtual space composed of 16K 4GB virtual 
spaces.

Having worked with them I can tell you that Intel hardware engineers of 
the day thought they were providing wonderful memory control functions. 
  But they hadn't a clue about the difficulties they were imposing on 
the system software guys that had to write the software to control and 
keep track of segmented address spaces.  Having lived through the 
software development of the 16 bit segmented architectures of the 8086 
and 80286 it was more than welcome to settle on a 32 bit flat address 
space in later processors.

Now we're finally at 64 bits and I think that should be the end of the 
line.  I think I recall reading somewhere that 64 bits is more than 
enough to enumerate all the atoms in the universe of some other such 
incredulous number.

Chuck Norcutt


On 9/26/2010 2:37 PM, James King wrote:

>
> P.S. I dont have any experience of Macs so I dont know if the same
> ram limits apply as windows.... in theory even the ancient 486 could
> access way more than 4gb but was limited to 4gb per application
> running. Microsoft never took advantage of this :-(
>
-- 
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