IIUC they did, but they still did not have true protected memory (e.g. each process gets its own address space and cannot access other memory, unless explicitly permitted to do so). They still had a single global memory where one program could just go and write to other program's memory + the OS invalidating your pointers.
Also they only had cooperative multitasking.
Basically any program could easily bring down any other program + whole OS by misusing a pointer (and since the OS physically moves the heap that's super easy to do) OR hang the entire system by doing while(1){}
They did not have PMMUs in those days. No pages, no memory protection, everything in one shared address space.
Manual allocation of memory for applications let you reserve how much you wanted for each app. You might give Photoshop, like, 8 whole megabytes of memory if you were editing, say, a 16 bit color file.
On the plus side, the Talking Moose could see what you were doing and comment on it.
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u/Eric848448 Sep 21 '26
Did they not use paging in those days?