Historically, this is not entirely correct. Segmented MMUs (as opposed to the more common, currently used concept of paged MMUs) were intended to provide the ha

Historically, this is not entirely correct. Segmented MMUs (as opposed to the more common, currently used concept of paged MMUs) were intended to provide the hardware support for the protection levels and the data/code mixture in OOP. I.e. each object would have executable, readable, r/w and inaccessible parts. Protected by the MMU, depending on the currently accessing context, that is, a subclass, friend class, other class, etc. But creating a segment descriptor for each object or even just each class was, of course, far too expensive in the end.