Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronbo
Far as I remember the 286 was the first true 16 bit CPU in Intel flavor.  |
No, the 8086 was a true 16 bit processor, the 8088 dropped the external bus width to 8, but was still 16 bit in every other way. Perhaps you're thinking of the
really old 8008, which was 8 bit. The 286 had the ability to address 16 megs of memory by kicking the processor in to protected mode, but hardly anything was written in PM back then. What you could do (and you
might remember this) was to referece the first 64k of extended memory even though you were in real mode. You did this by opening the A20 gate and then using a segment register loaded with FFFF to address the memory. It was called the "High Memory Area" and you used to load himem.sys to do that and "Load DOS High." Coming back to you yet?
