Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kerravon86 1175 days ago
Exactly. Conventional wisdom said that the 16 MiB barrier was impossible to break. After that was broken, the next thing that was impossible to break was the 2 GiB barrier. That was broken too. I'm talking about 32-bit S/370 code. Obviously IBM independently broke the 2 GiB barrier by switching to 64-bit programming.

But in hindsight, a "properly-written" program from the 1970s would have been restricted to 16 MiB at that time, but magically turned into 2 GiB in the 1980s, and then magically turned into 4 GiB in I think the 2010s (but this is murkier about when you want to start counting - real hardware was only demonstrated in 2022 or 2023 - can't remember).