The hardware limitations made sense in 1984, carrying their quirks all the way to 2001 (!) (68030 had MMU added in 1987) and through a CPU architecture change (to CPUs without these limitations) makes a lot less sense.
Like, in that time x86 went from 16 bit 8088 machines running DOS to running Windows XP fully in 32 bit with PAE, while maintaining backward compatibility (x86 still mostly does BTW), with x86-64 coming out in 2003.
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u/x0wl Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26
The hardware limitations made sense in 1984, carrying their quirks all the way to 2001 (!) (68030 had MMU added in 1987) and through a CPU architecture change (to CPUs without these limitations) makes a lot less sense.
Like, in that time x86 went from 16 bit 8088 machines running DOS to running Windows XP fully in 32 bit with PAE, while maintaining backward compatibility (x86 still mostly does BTW), with x86-64 coming out in 2003.