Roland Perry wrote:
> 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.
Not really - it exemplifies the sort of thinking that went on in the
late 70s / early 80s - thirty years ago. If we're talking about ideas
that are now no longer tenable this qualifies.
--
John Wright |