Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 09:16 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), jgd@cix.co.uk
(John Dallman) wrote:

In article <vq82c8$232tl$7@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro) wrote:
>

How would you have done games without being able to directly
address screen memory? I'm sure PC/IX, being a Unix-type system,
would have disallowed that.

>
How?
>
There's no memory management hardware in an 8088, and PC/IX ran on a
basic PC/XT.

Programmatically - the compiler (and/or assembler) could disallow it.

Programmatic isolation works quite well as long as everyone plays by
the rules.  [Which, of course, is hard to enforce.]

John