HP-41 - Memory modules

[Dave Britten]

(04-10-2019 06:38 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  

(04-10-2019 04:01 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  That quote from Gates is apocryphal at best, and completely fabricated at worst. The whole 640K (...)
I had to use a machine with 64-bit Excel to finish the analytics I was trying to do.)

Yes Dave: I am very well aware of that. I was there, and was so lucky to have first hand experience.
And I concur with your recap. Thank you.

Just wanted to clear the air and make sure nobody got the impression that "dumb ol' IBM and Bill Gates" did anything unusually short-sighted with regards to the 1 MB limit. Mac OS also had its own shortcomings that were artifacts of the design constraints of that original 128 KB model, and they never went away until they scrapped the whole thing and made Mac OS X 16 years later.

IBM just had the distinction of having their "architecture" cloned and suddenly all the implementation details and limits became compatibility requirements. If the same had happened to the Apple II (or at least to the same degree - there were a couple clones) we'd probably be bitching about Woz's design instead.