David Hess (davidwhess.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 27, 2021 11:35 am wrote:
> blaine (myname.delete@this.acm.org) on September 26, 2021 11:19 pm wrote:
> >
> > As someone who was there: Morse was under severe constraints in design of the 8086.
> > I would not read anything into segments but as an expedient under constraints.
>
> I will add as an experienced 8080 and Z80 programmer at the time, the 8086 segmenting scheme was seen as a great
> improvement over contemporary developing solutions. Its limitations only became a problem later when single
> data structures exceeded the size of the entire 64 kilobyte address range of the previous generation of processors,
> and the alternatives (Zilog, others), except for a single larger address range (68000), were worse.
>

Funny, I rn into the same thing on the Burroughs b5500. Our SIMULA compiler was a preprocessor to Algol. Would generate code segments that were too long.

History is littered with "they'll never ..." quotes. Bob Barton ... "they will never need more than 32K words."