02-07-2009, 03:51 AM
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Senior Club Cobra Member
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Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Covington,
wa
Cobra Make, Engine: Superformance # 532, 466 BB, 560HP
Posts: 3,029
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Not Ranked
Quote:
Originally Posted by patrickt
In a 32 bit environment that is the largest number that a single register on the CPU can hold (a doubleword). In other words, it is 11111111111111111111111111111111, or in hexadecimal FFFFFFFF, or in decimal, 4294967295, or "zero minus one." Back in the old days, your 8088 computer (the one with two 5.25 inch floppies and no hard drive) had a processor with registers that only stored 16 bits, or 1111111111111111, or FFFF, or 65535 (the magic 640k limit of real mode computing, because we used "segments" and "offsets" to reference memory and FFFF was the bigest number you could stuff in to a register). So in the old days, his message count would be 65535. It was just a hiccup in the software that stuffed -1 in to his "message count."  |
I have been lost since this post and on.   |