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Legend2440yesterday at 9:20 PM2 repliesview on HN

>I still do not understand how one can consider writing to memory the OS owns to be ok.

Things were different back then. People did a lot of hacky stuff to fit their programs into memory, because you were genuinely constrained by hardware limitations.

Not to mention, the idea of the OS owning the machine was not as well developed as it is today. Windows 3.11 was just another program, it didn't have special permissions like modern OSes, and you would routinely bypass it to talk to the hardware directly.


Replies

jasonfarnonyesterday at 11:26 PM

"Not to mention, the idea of the OS owning the machine "

I agree--back then when computers had <=4MB or RAM I would've called hogging unused memory for some selfish speculative future use "professional malpractice".

ErroneousBoshyesterday at 10:11 PM

> Things were different back then. People did a lot of hacky stuff to fit their programs into memory, because you were genuinely constrained by hardware limitations.

Are you going to tell them what "32-bit Clean" meant for Mac developers, or will we let them find out that particular horror movie for themselves?