> "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981.
> how does this relate to today's RAM, such as 64MB?
> is it a factor of 100 or 1000 or ????
> and he /was/ referrring to RAM, right??
He wasn't the only one to make prediction error.
Intel has done his mistake in hardware.
It's not enough to have the ram you should also be able to manage
its address from the processor...
The 8086 has only 20 lines to address memory. Guess how much
it is 2^20 (2*2*2*2*2... 20 times) 1Mb aka 1024Kb=640K+384K...
Motorola 68000 that was older (I mean it was designed before
8086) had 32 lines!!!!
Furthermore some of the addressing space is used by ROM and
by the video adapter...
Another source of long term problem... you have a window in your
addressing space of some Kb that point to the video RAM on your
video card but now video boards have Mbs of RAM... so you have
to move the window (change the banks etc...) to access the entire
RAM on your video board...
Of course the address of the video RAM is a standard!!! So if you
change it you'll find DOS programs that won't work...
When RAM became more "cheap" EMS born.
You were constrained to access RAM throug IO rather than on the
processor bus. Dark ages!!!
Apple and commodore used Motorola processors to build their
computer.
I never used an Apple (for more than 2 minutes) but Amiga was
great (I never have had an Amiga, I've spent my chidhood on a
Spectrum and then on a 286 what a mistake!!!)
If you haven't appreciated the impact of 20 bits inspite of 32 I can
remember the long history of memory manager (HIMEM, EMM386,
QEMM) etc...
Intel didn't have 32 bit registers, no "protected mode"...
Protected mode is a real PITA on Intel processors.
These basis have been (and are) a severe mortgage over future
developement (I'm an assembler programmer and I assure you
these things seems evil if you know how better they could be).
But there were too many applications to save and compatibility was
a must.
Another urban legend narrates that intel paid some engineers at
IBM... ???
-------------------------------------------
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Webmaster Gorilla Bookstore http://www.gorilla.it
Tel. +39 2 3311105/34530455 Fax. +39 2 34531591
Via Mac Mahon 9, Milano, Italy
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