Retro on billpg industries™

8086 Segmented Memory Was a Good Idea. (Almost.)

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:41:55 +0000

How’s that for a click‑bait title. Who in their right mind would defend the monstrosity that is the 8086 segmented memory architecture?

By the time I got into 8086 assembly, PCs were mostly 80286‑based, but everything still ran under DOS. A “normal” machine only had the canonical 640KB of conventional memory and every assembly book had a dreaded chapter explaining segmentation. I still have the battle scars. Near pointers, far pointers, and the infamous “wherever‑you‑are” pointers.

Hearthfire Part One: Lighting the Flame

Fri, 08 May 2026 18:54:20 +0000

Every so often a project lodges itself in your brain and refuses to leave quietly. This began as a late‑night thought experiment, the kind that keeps circling until you either build it or write it down. For months it’s been pacing around the edges of my mind.

What if I knew what I know now, but I lived in the 1980s and worked for a plucky home computer maker?

"The games you get today, well they might be very flash, but they'll never beat the thrill of getting through jetpack."

The spark came from a familiar place. I’d been following the Commander X16 project, a modern reimagining of what might have happened if Commodore had stayed the course with the 6502 instead of leaping to the Amiga. The X16’s operating system keeps the approachable, single‑tasking spirit of the C64 and even followed through to shipping real hardware you can buy today. Watching that project take shape made me wonder about a different branch of the timeline. An 8‑bit machine that embraced pre‑emptive multitasking, shared memory regions, and a more ceremonial sense of system design.

Falco T310 - Unleashed

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 13:10:00 +0000

1993. Computers were desktop PCs running MS-DOS and the Internet was unheard of. My school had a number of PCs with Borland Pascal installed which my friends and I happily learnt. Along the way, we wrote a clever variation of the Minesweeper game. Life was good. That would all change when I started my Computer Science degree course at university that year. Instead of many single-user machines running MS-DOS, we’d all be sharing a multi-user machine running UNIX.