Computers Kept a Bug Alive for 30 Years Because Fixing It Was Worse
26K views · Aug 23, 2026 · Education
Comments · 130
@thesolderman861 · 1 month ago
Recently I walked through the Airport in Frankfurt and found on a door the following sentence: <br>"The Gate A20 is closed permanently." 😮<br>I gulped and went away. 😂
32
@williefleete · 1 month ago
We need to start going back to “trimming the fat” with memory usage
16
@travisback6756 · 1 month ago
I remember fighting with XMS and EMS back in high school. It sucked!
3
@LelandMaurello · 1 month ago
Damn i remember so welll<br>Fixing config.sys with Emm.386 and arguments.
3
@TedRader · 1 month ago
Pardon, Ma'am, your Ai slop is showing..."Him-Em"?!" It's himem (pronounced high-mem)
22
@KilgoreTroutAsf · 1 month ago
OpenAI, stretch this 100 word factoid I to a 20000 word essay
1
@davidgrisez · 1 month ago
Another interesting note is that by the time the new IBM PC AT with the Intel 80286 came out that could address 16mb of memory in protected mode, so much software was already written for the original IBM PC with the Intel 8088 that to a large extent the new PC AT with the Intel 80286 was being run in real mode like it was a faster 8088 with the newer higher address range of protected mode being rarely used.
2
@williamsquires3070 · 1 month ago
Now here’s the interesting part: IBM had the same problem back in the ‘60s with the System/360 mainframe architecture; they built it with a 24-bit address space but with 32-bit registers. Programmers, even IBM’s own, would use the upper bits for features which weren’t guaranteed to work in the future, and this got baked into the ecosystem of programs when IBM came out with the System/370. IBM got stuck because banks, and other large institutions needed their old, legacy software to work with newer hardware that could address the 4 billion or so memory slots.
1
@alanjhargreaves · 1 month ago (edited)
How much of a better place would we have been in if IBM had gone with the 68000 or the ns32032?
5
@8bitsaga · 1 month ago
This was never a "bug" or a "mistake" as the video says. It was a characteristics in the 8086, and an operation mode in subsequent processors.
3
@gorilladisco9108 · 1 month ago
What kind of software relies on memory address wraparound?
4
@CarlosWilsonDantas · 1 month ago
Muito bom ❤
Up next
The Missing Instruction That Crippled Early CPUs
The Part That Changed the World · 55K views
MSX miss. Why 80s Japanese computers failed in the West
Little Car · 37K views
THE INDUSTRY TREATED COMPILERS AS A SIDE PROJECT — Frances Allen Turned Them Into Computer Science
Digital Archeology · 13K views
The Chip That Made PCs Feel Fast
American Forgotten Empires · 15K views
Why Japan's Engineers Could Not Explain How B-29s Cruised Above Every Fighter
The Blueprint Vault · 452K views
Is This The Most Manufactured Thing In Human History?
Parts That Changed History and 2 more · 20K views
Gary Kildall Wrote the Operating System IBM Wanted First — Then Microsoft Took the Deal Instead
Forgotten American Tech · 23 views
The Millisecond Error That Cost Intel $475 Million
American Forgotten Empires · 57K views
Is This The Chip That Taught Computers To Talk?
Part That Changed American History · 5.2K views
What Happened to Windows NT? The Operating System That Became the Foundation of Modern Windows
America’s Lost Technology and Vintage Electronics Archive · 13K views
What Happened to RISC OS? The British Operating System That Refused to Die
Fallen Tech · 15K views
The Rise and Fall of RISC OS: British Operating System That Almost Beat Windows, Then Erased Itself
The Fallen Boardroom and The Fatal Board · 17K views
Legends of the RISC Wars
Asianometry · 340K views
What Happened to the Motorola 68000? Why the Legendary Chip Disappeared
System Ruins · 1.7K views
The $10 Billion Processor Mistake Intel Won't Talk About
American Forgotten Empires · 13K views
The 1-Bit Problem That Nearly Stopped the Computer Revolution
The Part That Changed the World · 21K views
The Tiny Chip That Solved a $5 Billion Problem
The Chip That Changed the World · 622 views
What Happened to ARM? Britain’s Chip Empire That Conquered the World — Then Got Sold
Tech Uncovered · 33K views
The Tiny Chip Inside Every 1980s Computer That Nobody Could Copy
The Chip That Changed the World · 1.8K views
THE CHIP THAT GAVE COMPUTERS COLOR — The TMS9918 Story
American Forgotten Empires · 645 views
What Happened to the DEC Alpha? The Fastest Chip Nobody Bought
Proud Ruins · 14K views
What Happened to Lotus 1-2-3? Why the Spreadsheet King Disappeared
Ctrl+Alt+Fail · 154K views
25 Technologies From the 1970s That Seemed INCREDIBLE at the Time
The Technology America Left Behind and Lost American Memories · 103K views
The Rise and Fall of Cyrix: The $550M Texas Chipmaker That BEAT Intel, Then Vanished
Hidden Tech · 1 views
53 Useless Old Tech Products That FADED into History
The Fatal Board · 134K views
What Happened to the Zilog Z80? The Chip That Took 48 Years to Die
The Gadget Attic · 4.5K views