The 8086 was a stopgap measure to accommodate the fact the iAPX432 was in the middle of turning into the disaster it did. Given the engineering resources and timelines involved in the 8086, it wasn't a bad compromise approach.

> But more importantly it kept the x86 world for too long in that dead end that was 8086 mode programming > > "Oh if developers would just..." They won't. They haven't. And they will not ever.

8086 real mode programming in the mainstream lasted from 1981 until 1991 or so. The last 35 years have 32-bit (and later 64-bit) flat model addressing with pages for the most part. Seems like a reasonable transition period, really.

> In hindsight maybe a binary level translator from 8080 to 8086 would have worked better (and be simple enough)

Part of the reason they liked the segmented model is that it was possible to set the segments to the same value and then ignore them entirely. That gave a programming model for the 8086 that was sufficiently close to the 8080 that it was possible to use a sort of cross assembler to do something like what you suggest. You could then opt into 8086 specific instructions and segmentation as you needed. (Which took a few years... the first IBM PC's shipped with as little as 16K of RAM.)

Indeed, I say as much at the end.

But what should Intel have done? They needed a CPU that can run 8080 code but with more memory. Also it's the year ~1980 and we're limited to the technology of the age.

A system with 64k sized windows seems unavoidable.

If you extend the size of the address registers, 8080 code will only run in the first 64k, or require some kind of current window register.

An 8080 mode might have worked but that would have been expensive.

It's not all that different from the memory pages we have today, except that the 'segment' addressing has become a lot more complex under the hood (multi-level page tables) and a lot simpler at the surface (by merging the 'segment-' and page-address bits into a single virtual address).

PS: and segmented memory wasn't all that different from the memory banking used before in 8-bit home computers to address more than 64 KBytes, except that the memory mapping hardware was implemented outside the CPU.

> In hindsight maybe a binary level translator from 8080 to 8086 would have worked better (and be simple enough)

Many programs written in assembly language used self modifying code back then. It saved RAM and improved performance. All programs that used such trickery would have broken by a binary translator.

Don't know why you're being voted down - you're correct - segmented memory was an awful nasty complex way to program and the industry was eager to see the backside of it.

Why would someone be popping up in 2026 saying it was awesome? Weird.