In message , at 16:14:32 on
Fri, 19 Jun 2009, John Wright remarked:
>>> Likewise "640KB of RAM should be plenty for running all forseeable
>>>software"
>> That one has never been authenticated, although commonly
>>[mis]attributed to Bill Gates. In practice, the design of the IBM PC,
>>which quickly became the standard, only had "slots" for 640K of RAM;
>>until some people found loopholes.
>
>You still had a lot of hoops to jump trough (expanded/extended memory).
>
>The basic MSDOS could only cope with 640K.
It could address the whole Megabyte (but no more, because that was the
8086's limit). Whether it had a limit of 640k of contiguous RAM, I'm not
sure. But I doubt it, because that would mean checking you hadn't gone
above 640K, and MSDOS didn't generally do boundary checking (of any
kind).
>It was also true that upto Windows 95 you could only address 2Gb of
>disk space.
That's a different issue - the FAT size and number of blocks. The first
MSDOS I shipped (v3.2) had a limit of 32Mbyte.
--
Roland Perry |