@Vic (was: Re: The storage is there, as advertised.)
You are wrong, Vic. It's true that you had to know how to make use of bits & pieces of RAM above 640K, including telling hardware it's new memory address (with jumpers and/or dip switches, usually; sometimes by physically pulling the hardware). It's also true that IBM "reserved" the upper 384 KB of memory space that the 8088 could address.
Not all of us listened to IBM. Some of us used dumb terminals attached to a serial port to run the system (granted, most users had no clue what CTTY was for ...), and physically or virtually pulled the video hardware taking up unnecessary RAM. That took XT computers up to about 704K. Later memory managers took the barrier to 736K (or a hair higher, I hit 740 on one system, with good stability (for MS-DOS)). Still later, add-on hardware & attendant drivers could take DOS memory up above 950K on XT machines.
Note that box-stock DOS 1.0 and up could use the memory, if available, without modification. It was IBM's stupidity of putting hardware ROM near the top of the memory that caused all this hassle. I'm no fan of Microsoft, not by a long shot, but blaming MS and/or Gates on IBM's built-in hardware limitations is just plain daft.
And don't get me started on Intel's lack of MMU ...
As a side-note, I'm typing this on a dumb terminal attached to a laptop's docking station serial port. Running Slackware-current instead of MS-DOS, but it still works. When I'm writing, an IBM 3151 terminal & model M keyboard have no equals ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
