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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: 386 Family Products
Message-ID: <6260@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Jan-86 12:19:21 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6260
Posted: Fri Jan  3 12:19:21 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 3-Jan-86 12:19:21 EST
References: <129@intelca> <4400130@uiucdcsb> <6185@utzoo.UUCP> <6246@utzoo.UUCP>, <467@ihlpl.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 14

> > ... irrelevant to the point I was making:  that the 386's
> > segments are largely useless, and do not constitute a useful feature.
> 
> 386 segments provide a useful way to access data files as a byte-addressable
> array instead of as a series of records which must be seeked, getted and putted.

You can do that perfectly well with a paging machine, given a decent MMU
design; you don't need the silly segments.  That's pretty much how shared-
text binaries work on 4BSD, and (as I recall) 4.2 was originally planned
to have more general file-into-address-space mapping primitives as well.
On a paged machine.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry