Rich Grise writes:

Anyway, at the time Intel came out with the 8088, everyone with half a
brain or more wondered, "If they're segmenting memory to get an effective
20-bit address, with two overlapping 16-bit address registers, why didn't
they just multiplex it to 32 x 16 right on the spot, and not worry about
"segmentation," but start right out with flat memory? There's really
no excuse for making a processor as crippled as an 8088, other than that
everybody already had an 8080, and all of the peripherals were 8 bits,
and the bus was 8 bits at the time; but why not just for the time being,
ignore the unused 8 bits on the 16-bit bus, go ahead and have 16-bit wide
memory on-board, and so on?

Engineers always make mistakes with addressing; there is probably no
other aspect of computer engineering that is as consistently the
source of serious design errors as addressing. Yes, the engineers
could have planned ahead ... but they never do.

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