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by michaelmike
4377 days ago
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Inspire is not quite the word I would use, I think. The reason so much was done on the 386 is because Intel finally dropped that god-awful segmented addressing in favor of a flat memory model. In addition, protected mode became actually useful and was necessary for a Unix-like OS to be created (where you have multitasking and protected sections of RAM). Doom was also a killer-app for the 386. |
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There are Unix-like OS's on MMU-less architectures. Though of course there are limitations (like not supporting fork(), only vfork()). But you're right that it made it a lot more attractive to try to do a proper Unix.
There were even commercial Unix workstations based on MMU-less CPU's. An example is the Sun 1 workstation, that used an 68000 (Since the first version - the 68000 - is not fully restartable, various hacks were used on 68000 designs requiring an MMU; I'm not sure what the Sun-1 did, but one example that was used was running two of them in lockstep, and have the MMU halt the second one when the first one triggered a page fault, so that it'd be possible to inspect the CPU state before a bus-error would mess it up. From the 68010 onwards this was unnecessary)