25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4201

You can do the same thing on a 286. Each process gets around 8000 private segments and there are also around 8000 global segments. I don't see the problem.

If you are willing to structure your program as a series of overlays (and divide your data in 64KB chunks) then there is plenty of support for doing that.

I would not call this IPC. To me, IPC means processes that communicate without saving data on disk. For example, using shared memory, using OS provided communication primitives (Unix pipes) or using a network.

But the complaints about the 286 seem to be that people want to run large programs without explicitly creating overlays or splitting up data.

The 286 can do everything the pdp-11 can do, with the exception of the slightly more fine-grained memory allocation supported by the pdp-11 MMU.

-- That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. -- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency