Comment by justtopost
7 years ago
Ems / xms was a hack to use the extra memory. Without those systems you would never see more than the base ram. These started out as 3rd party software before eventually becoming part of msdos. I still remember the sticker shock when buying a retail copy of EMM386. So I suppose 'support' is a bit weasely here.
Expanded memory cards did exist before EMM386, and could be programmed to map in 4×16 KB pages to D000 or E000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory#Expansion_boar...