alamanos opened this issue on Jan 29, 2007 ยท 127 posts
svdl posted Thu, 01 February 2007 at 11:30 AM
Uhm, segmentation was the memory model used in Win3.x (and Mac OS 9 and lower). Win32 uses paging, as do Linux, Mac OSX, WinXP 64 and Vista.
So the claim that going from 32 bit to 64 bit wasn't all that difficult is just plain true. There's no reason to believe that Vista and XP64 are not fully 64 bit - it is actually more work to create a scheme to allow a 32 bit system to address more than 4 GB than to port it to full 64 bit.
Windows 95, 98 and Millenium were NOT true 32 bit operating systems. Part of their core still depended on the 16 bit segmentation scheme, other parts used 32 bit paging.
Windows 2000, XP and later are all based on the NT 3.51 system, which is not derived from DOS (as many Windows haters believe) but from Vax VMS. NT 3.51 has been 32 bit paging from its very start..
So about rewriting the segmentation code: it has already been done. Many years ago.
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter