alt Hacker News> And this is the problem, it was very painful just to walk through a 200 KB buffer. This required compiler/runtime tricks, different selector increments in real vs protected mode, and special pointer types.
Most of that could be (and often was) hidden by the tooling. If you needed to bypass it, you could, but you didn't need to. That's not very different from today... there's a lot of hidden magic that can be bypassed if you need to for whatever reason.
I'd argue that these are useful engineering abstractions that made the best of a less than ideal situation. (The reality of the world being that there are no "ideal" situations... you have to work with what you have at the moment to solve the problem you have. These days, I'd argue that a pointer into a 'flat' memory space is counter productive to the extent it hides issues around cache hierarchy, NUMA, etc. In 1986, we had to worry that a flat memory space looked discontiguous. In 2026, we have to worry the a discontiguous memory space looks flat.
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OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up. You always had to keep it in the back of your mind if you wrote PC software. Even if you just ran PCs, you had to worry about the compatibility between your OS, your "DOS extender", and your programs.
There were literally millions of man-hours wasted on segment registers. 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.
>> In 2026, we have to worry the a discontiguous memory space looks flat.
Well, there are large/huge pages (2MiB/4MiB/1GiB) that reduce this problem.