[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah don't get me wrong, I was an ST user and loved it. It was a business and technical accomplishment. All respect to it. My point was only that for that class of machines what we really needed was wider address buses, not necessarily wider data buses. Along with a wider data bus came slower cycle times for a bunch of operations. And cost.

[mschaef]

> [Atari] ST.... what we really needed was wider address buses,

Are you sure? With memory costing hundreds of dollars per MB in the mid-80's, I remember thinking a 24-bit address bus was plenty. (I actually don't think I personally had a computer with enough RAM to need more than 24-bits of physical addressing until the mid-90's.)

[cmrdporcupine]

I never meant wider than 24 bits. I meant wider than the 16 bits on the 8-bit machines. Sorry if I was unclear. I didn't need a machine with more than 16MB until the mid 90s.

[mschaef]

Agreed... 16-bit physical addressing was very limiting. (x86's 16-bit segment offsets were bad enough.)