The way Intel did it was absolutely horrible. Had the left shift of segment selectors on the 8086 been 8 bits rather than 4, the extra 15MB of address space wo

The way Intel did it was absolutely horrible. Had the left shift of segment selectors on the 8086 been 8 bits rather than 4, the extra 15MB of address space would have given DOS apps substantially more headroom. Having programmed C and assembly on both the x86 and the 68000 in the 1980s, x86 was an absolute nightmare to program. Even in C you had to always be intimately aware of your memory model at all times on x86 (remember near, far and huge pointers??!!?) annotating pointers to work around limitations of the architecture, whereas on 68k everything was just a 32 bit pointer. Oh the loss of productivity that one decision driven by the desire to save money avoiding putting an extra 4 address pins on the CPU ended up costing the industry. The horror.