| > OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up. This was less about tooling than it was about economics - there was 32-bit hardware available in the personal computer space in 1984, if not before. The issue was cost. In today's currency, a 32-bit capable Mac was $8,000 with 128K. The first 32-bit capable PC was closer to $20,000. That's a heavy lift in a world where a segmented architecture machine costs a fraction of that amount, runs software you might already have, and works the same way as your co-worker's machine. > There were literally millions of man-hours wasted on segment registers. A software developer in 1986 was not forced to deal with segment registers... but they often chose to deal with them to gain access a (much) bigger audience of potential customers for their software. > A kludge that helped Intel conquer the world, but what a filthy, disgusting architecture, and what a waste of everybody's time and brain power. The other side of the coin is that (for reasons I state above), segmented architectures got more capable software into more hands more quickly. It arguably did a lot for end users. |