12 Nov
2007
12 Nov
'07
10:21 p.m.
Brian L. Stuart wrote:
Pardon my ignorance, but were there any places where the top four bits
were actually used? I mean, I don't believe there was a machine back
then capable of running MULTICS and also having more than 8Gb primary
storage. Wouldn't it be possible to fake it by just chopping off the
four most-significant bits and using the remaining 32?
Peace... Sridhar
>>>
But what machines could run the that today?
>> Anything you port it to.
The segmentation architecture would be hard to fake. And
the idea of segments is so deeply ingrained, I doubt you'd
want to try. However, the x86 does seem to have the necessary
segmentation structure. Unfortunately, it's only got 32-bit
addresses. Even in the 60s, the Multics machines had 36.