# Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Wet Clothing Forum - Beach Club ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by MRN on September 04, 2023 at 19:27:08

In Reply to: Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall posted by Squishy Plushie on September 03, 2023 at 23:54:38:

I don’t know EMS or XMS — I never found the mess that is the PC architecture worth much interest. Acorn and Apple had flat 24-bit address spaces and their only problem was people re-using the fourth byte of pointers in forwards-incompatible ways. (Definitely the Mac; I am not 100% sure that the Archimedes did the same but I seem to recall that it did.)

As far as 8-bit goes, how many other home computers besides the BBC Micro had a dedicated operating system? That is, aside from the ones that ran CP/M. The BBC A and B had a weakness that the OS had no shell (you needed the BASIC ROM for that); the Master rectified that.

It’s strange looking back at the 8-bit world knowing how it was doomed from day 1 to go nowhere, as the address space was just too limited. The 24-bit world, so long as it avoided abusing the unused MSB of pointers (which on the Mac, was not avoided!) was fully forwards-compatible with 32-bit address space which is still perfectly viable to this day. It’s only the absolute trash that the Web has got into that causes home and office users to need more than 2 GB/process, and multi-process browser architecture mitigates that to some extent.

Oh no, here comes a random reader to tell me off! Cya! ........................................................

Follow Ups:

- Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 05:50:32 9/05/2023 (0)
- Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall a random reader 19:50:38 9/04/2023 (13)
  - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Dark Passage Playtime 06:10:46 9/05/2023 (0)
  - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall MRN 23:01:56 9/04/2023 (11)
    - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 06:33:43 9/05/2023 (10)
      - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall MRN 20:17:28 9/05/2023 (8)
        - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 21:42:10 9/05/2023 (7)
          - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall MRN 22:34:49 9/05/2023 (6)
            - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 23:31:01 9/05/2023 (5)
              - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall MRN 00:30:44 9/06/2023 (4)
                - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 07:47:51 9/06/2023 (3)
                  - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 08:03:03 9/06/2023 (2)
                    - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall MRN 21:10:09 9/06/2023 (1)
                      - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 21:25:54 9/06/2023 (0)
      - Re: Pride Comes Before A Fall Squishy Plushie 12:25:14 9/05/2023 (0)

Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:

Comments:

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Wet Clothing Forum - Beach Club ] [ FAQ ]