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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by shortscreen on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:11AM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:11AM (#633657) Journal

    I have used various versions of DOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, and '80s home computer OSs, mostly covered by other posters' lists, but I didn't see Amiga yet (I played with MorphOS a bit too). And how about MSX-DOS, Human68K, and whatever OS the TI calculators used?

    It's too bad that the Amiga didn't have memory protection from the beginning. It worked pretty well, in between crashes/gurus/reboots. Of course the 68000 had no MMU, and many 68K-based computer lines were born and died without ever getting a proper protected mode, preemptive multitasking OS. I guess the 68000 suffered from being "good enough." PCs started with the inferior 8086 and were able to move beyond its limitations. Imagine if the 8086 had 24-bit addressing (shift those segments left another four bits). Without having run out of address space so soon (640KB/1MB limit vs. hypothetical 16MB limit), how much longer would 16-bit DOS/Windows have hung on before finally being displaced by Windows NT?

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:27AM

    by dry (223) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:27AM (#634326) Journal

    Moving to NT as soon as the hardware supported it well would have happened if only for the memory protection, at least assuming the vendor put in close to equal support.