final brainteaser for the day

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_eskimo.com>
Date: Thu Jun 27 20:14:31 2002

On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 10:48:43AM -0600, Ben Franchuk wrote:
> "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Ben Franchuk wrote:
> > > PC there was only 4 OS's that I know of when it first came out
> > > CP/M,DOS,Pascal,Forth. Most real software started with the 286.
> >
> > Isn't that:
> > "Most real software ENDED with the 286." ?
>
> I was thinking of unix style OS's. The 286 was the first intel cpu
> with some sort of real memory managment.

Perhaps Intel thought that memory management and protection in hardware
was not necessary. Crossing from the ISIS thread...

ISIS' programming tools are designed to organize your program into
a code segment, a data segment, a stack segment, and a memory segment
(everything in the first contiguous block of RAM that is not taken up
by the code, data, or stack).

Sounds like the 8086, except ISIS runs on the 8080 so the segmentation
is done purely in software.

As for protection: ISIS has a medium-level language (PL/M), a linker,
and a relocating loader. Given those tools, I can see someone claiming
that protection is the responsibility of the programmer.
Received on Thu Jun 27 2002 - 20:14:31 BST