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Comment by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA

11 hours ago

640

64, not 640.

  • Well, 16 KB - 256 KB, with a directly addressable 64 KB and a segmented architecture to reach further.

    I had one of these in mid 1982 to late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

    • Technically it could be expanded all the way to 640KB

      But only the first 256 KB was on the motherboard, you needed a memory expansion card for the extra 384 KB, and I don't think they really existed in 1982.

      Actually, you could somewhat break the 640KB limit in the early days (not that most people could afford that much RAM) days. Until EGA came along in 1984, there was free address space upto 704KB that you could use as conventional memory without much issue (or 736KB if you limited yourself to CGA).

      And later we had the mess of EMS, which would work on the original 5150 with the right expansion card (and the right software to take advantage of it, like Lotus 123)