Author here
Author here. This is one of those things, where 99.999% of all IT people have never even heard or imagined that things can be different than "how we have always done it." (Obligatory Douglas Adams quote goes here.) This makes a certain kind of people, self-secure in their own knowledge, burst out words like "clueless", "fail miserably" etc. based on insufficient depth of actual knowledge. To them I can only say: Study harder, this is so much more technologically interesting, than you can imagine. And yes, neither the iAPX432, nor for that matter Z8000, fared well with their segmented memory models, but it is important to remember that they primarily failed for entirely different reasons, mostly out of touch top-management, so we cannot, and should not, conclude from that, that all such memory models cannot possibly work. There are several interesting memory models, which never really got a fair chance, because they came too early to benefit from VLSI technology, and it would be stupid to ignore a good idea, just because it was untimely. …
Original discussionLinear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed172 source comments · at import