Huh?
There were no segmented x86 machines capable of addressing 256MB of RAM, aside from the 386 (maybe).
If you had a 386 and the $130K of memory your statement implies, you probably also could afford a Unix (or something else) license to get to that 32-bit address space. (If you weren't doing it all in memory, then you're having to depending on paging stuff out to disk, implying you either have a real OS or a flat memory model isn't enough to save you since you're manually having to page stuff to disk and back anyway.)
That's a super strange scenario you're describing.
Back then you had to chunk it out and fiddle with the offsets. Even then you still would have had to manage loading out the next chunk.
If my memory is right 1MB of memory in the early 90s was like 200-300 per meg. Would have to dig up a computer shopper and look.
I only have a couple reference points around this scale:
My dad's company had a system set up with a searchable index of a bunch of legal testimony. It was a Compaq Deskpro 386 running Unix with an attached 1GB disk. The 1GB disk set up was as big as the machine itself.
A few years later, I worked with a Cyber mainframe equipped with around 30GB of total attached disk storage. The disk array literally filled a room.
256MB disk on an 80's PC would have definitely been quite a bit.
I seem to remember that memory segments came with a permission system (read-only, read/write, execute) in 'protected mode'. Probably only added in the 286 though (I was always more of an m68k guy at that time).
If you do need something approaching a 2MB block of memory, you don't need a contiguous range of memory, what you need is a contiguous range of selectors, which is a different (and probably easier) problem to solve.
The operating system/DOS extender could choose to let tasks (programs) run with the highest privileges, which would turn off some of the checks but not all of them -- you still needed valid selectors into valid slots in the descriptor tables.
64K of actual text content in a single node could be reached in some documents, but it's not that small, more than a chapter of a typical book.
What was always a problem for segmented memory was graphics, at least if you wanted higher resolution than 320x200 at 256 colors. But you could have a segment pointer to each row of pixels instead of an entire image, as long as it would still fit within 1 MB (16 MB in the 286 protected mode).
Yet the article goes about the most ass backward way of explaining 8086 segments and constructs a convoluted mental picture of dividing memory into overlapping chunks.
It's really, really simple: segments on the 8086/88 are 64k sliding windows into an 1M address space. You can move them around at 16 byte granularity.
You need more than 64k for code + data? No problem, the CPU knows when it's fetching an instruction vs when it's fetching data, you can have two sliding windows: code (CS) and data (DS). Split them apart, and it's not much different than a Harvard-style machine and gives you access to more than 64k at a time.
Still need more? No problem, the CPU has a hardware stack with dedicated push/pop/call/ret instructions and a base pointer for stack indexing. It knows when it's accessing the stack, so we can split the data window into regular data (DS) and stack data (SS). Oh, you occasionally want to copy stuff between segments or somewhere else in memory? Well, to encode 3 segments we need 2 bits anyway, let's throw in an extra data window (ES) and some DS-to-ES copy instructions.
286 could then use the next 4 bits from the segment register to allow 16 MB address space and 386 could use all of them for 4GB. And wouldn't it be nice if 386 had 64KB pages (1 segment)?
The original 20 bit vision of the 8086 was when memory was very expensive and they expected typical high end machines to have 128K of memory.
Intel’s assembler was designed so you could have up to 128K of code with a “shared” segment in the middle that either side could reach with near (16 bit only) pointers to call commonly shared routines, and more rarely executed code existed on either end.
In addition data could be its own segment, and/or memory mapped I/O outside of the 128K space.
But memory got so cheap that nobody bothered with this, and the performance gains of writing code that way wasn’t worth the effort. X86 code was compact enough most programs could cram their code into 64k anyway, or 64k per functional unit with calls between them being rare.
The real tragedy is they went for 20 bit instead of 24 bit. 8086 with 16MB of addressable space would have been a very different world and would have made little difference if there use. (Paragraphs would have been 256 bytes, the same size as a page; most data structures would have been fine with that.)
How is that compatible with an array and a simple implementation of the index operator?
Imagine if you could have done something like this:
add si, some-delta
adsc es, 0
ADSC (add with segment carry) would do:
segreg := segreg + imm + 1000h (if carry)
segreg := segreg + imm (no carry)
ADSC could have been adapted for the 286 with ease, as long as a specific layout of the segment descriptor tables was mandated (probably with 10h instead of 1000h in protected mode).
Edited slightly for clarity (ofs => imm). A normalizing instruction would be harder to do right for the 286 because you don't want to spend too many slots in the descriptor table(s) for a single memory object.
Segmented memory (on hardware that supported segment permissions) was used to good effect in Multics as well.
The segment thing and the convoluted different pointer math caused real gymnastics if you ever had data bigger than 64k... such as images.
I always thought of the segments as windows of 64k but moving between those windows, esp with the limited register set, required some real mental gymnastics.
It was just a hack. Hack to delay migration to 32 bit architecture. Effective one, but hack nonetheless
No, it wasn't
It's the "great idea" that sounds great 5 min in and horrible 10min afterwards
You know, kinda like using null as a string end character
But more importantly it kept the x86 world for too long in that dead end that was 8086 mode programming
"Oh if developers would just..." They won't. They haven't. And they will not ever.
In hindsight maybe a binary level translator from 8080 to 8086 would have worked better (and be simple enough)
Except we couldn't. If we made each segment isolated from other, we would waste so much memory because memory are allocated in segment.
If we made each segment dynamic, we need something to manage them.
This "hindsight" is just a MMU in disguise.