I don't think anyone did 45 years ago and more, nor appreciate that C would be used in so many domains where having to use pointers in application code would lead to so many issues.I think Intel didn't anticipate how popular C would become when designing the 8086.
Even today it's not uncommon to find that engineers designing silicon don't talk to software engineers.
But, in their defence, creating a segmented memory architecture wasn't surprising in the era of 16-bit computers, when a 20-bit address bus would be all anyone would likely need, when 1MB would likely be all they'd be able to afford.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Mon Oct 27, 2025 8:53 pm