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Nitpick: It's essentially impossible that a 486 would come with 64KB of RAM. My 8088 XT clone in '88 came with 640KB. 4-16MB would be more common for the time.
by twoodfin 12y ago
Nitpick: It's essentially impossible that a 486 would come with 64KB of RAM. My 8088 XT clone in '88 came with 640KB. 4-16MB would be more common for the time.
- jschwartzi 12y agoWas it a PC-compatible? If so he might have had more memory but been unable to address it because he was running in Real Mode.
- metric10 12y agoI'm not aware of a non-PC compatible that had an 80486. In any event, real mode can address up to 1MB of memory, with 640KB available to programs. But I do think you are right. If all he had was DOS and QBASIC, he had no way to go into protected mode. He probably just dropped the 0 by mistake.
- xorcist 12y agoNo, he means 64 kB segments, which is what he had to deal with in the menu based file manager he wrote in QBASIC. That much should be clear if you read between the lines (the goto based text adventures etc.).
- rsync 12y agofrom another comment... "The confusion likely stems from the various limits which existed when running qbasic in real mode on a 486. Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS. Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic."