'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Brenda A. Bell]

>   The 640 KB limit arose from the original IBM-PC design, 
> circa 1980.  
> Since the 8086 didn't even have a memory manager, hardware 
> needed to be
> mapped directly into physical memory space, and IBM thought 
> 640/384 was a
> good place to draw the line between software and "reserved" memory.

Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I
believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need
more than 640K RAM in a personal computer".  I don't think anyone knew
what was going to happen in this space.  As much as I hate to give them
credit for anything, I believe Redmond is greatly responsible for the
kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people
wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up.