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A few operating systems, mostly UNIX clones, did exist that specifically took advantage of 286 protected mode. The 286 has user and supervisor modes, and could
by retrac 4y ago
A few operating systems, mostly UNIX clones, did exist that specifically took advantage of 286 protected mode. The 286 has user and supervisor modes, and could address up to 16 MB of physical memory. In protected mode it still used 8086 style segmented addressing, but the segments were virtual.
- Eleison23 4y agoThe bittersweet fact is that when the 80386 came out, OS designers dispensed with segmentation altogether, because it was conceptually so much easier to just flatten out a single vast address space. So despite the fact that i386 was now capable of really useful and intricate segmented memory architecture, it was the unsegmented, flat virtual address space that won the race.