26 Apr
2008
26 Apr
'08
8:13 a.m.
Alexandre Souza wrote:
True the BIOS being located at the top was not the problem, but putting
video at 0xA000. Sure, I realize that IBM didn't expect the PC to have
the life it did, but considering this: the TRS-80 family and many other
8 bitters had already evolved to architectures where the memory space
was fully RAM populated and hardware was mapped in and out as needed.
Moore's law was at the time a well known trend, and it wouldn't take a
genius to calculate that the 16-fold increase in memory would be outrun
in just a few years.
Duh, the other
really stupid one: taking the 1MB memory space and
putting BIOS and video where they did.
Was that a misdesign? If I'm not mistaken this is a particularity of
the 8086/8088, they expect the BIOS to be in FFxxsomething :o\