> I had to use it to do image processing on a 256MB image buffer back in the 1980s in assembly language.... Give me a flat 32 bit memory address space any day (e.g. MC68000 around the same time.)

Huh?

There were no segmented x86 machines capable of addressing 256MB of RAM, aside from the 386 (maybe).

If you had a 386 and the $130K of memory your statement implies, you probably also could afford a Unix (or something else) license to get to that 32-bit address space. (If you weren't doing it all in memory, then you're having to depending on paging stuff out to disk, implying you either have a real OS or a flat memory model isn't enough to save you since you're manually having to page stuff to disk and back anyway.)

That's a super strange scenario you're describing.