The 8086 couldn't properly run C unless you were willing to limit yourself to 64KB (or three times that, if separating code, data and stack didn't hurt your app

The 8086 couldn't properly run C unless you were willing to limit yourself to 64KB (or three times that, if separating code, data and stack didn't hurt your application). To use the full address space you had to use non standard extensions such as "near pointers" and "far pointers" (Microsoft) or "@" as an alternative to "*" but for the ES register (QNX). On the other hand, the addressing modes using the frame pointer were really great for Pascal. Segments didn't bother Pascal at all and even on the 68000 based Mac, which had a C friendly flat address space, the system software pretended to have segments. Growing segments from 64KB to 4GB was enough to allow the 386 to finally run the same C software as other processors like the VAX or 68000.