3 ms·
You can certainly make some RISC-V platform standard that fixes addresses if you like -- as the PC did by totally copying IBM's machines -- but people want to a
by brucehoult 3y ago
You can certainly make some RISC-V platform standard that fixes addresses if you like -- as the PC did by totally copying IBM's machines -- but people want to avoid that.
There was a large ecosystem of MS-DOS computers before the IBM PC took over that had very diverse hardware and depended on the BIOS for compatibility.
We lost a lot when we all had to copy IBM's 640k RAM limit and A20 bug. Other, earlier, MS DOS machines allowed more RAM than that e.g. DEC Rainbow supported 896k of RAM. With a suitable expansion card the Sanyo MBC-550 could make 960k of RAM available to MSDOS.