alt Hacker NewsI've been recently working with Classic Mac OS programming[0] and just that memory model (also using dealing with the lack of virtual memory using opaque handles to memory that need to be locked when used) is painful enough[1] - having to deal with segment addressing on top of that does not sound like fun. Thank god for the Motorola 68000!
[0]Made an AppleTalk chat client/server https://github.com/kalleboo/GlobalTalk-Chat
[1]The equivalent to HeapWalker I used was Metroweks ZoneRanger which was bundled with their compiler. It has a nice visualization of how fragmented the memory is https://bitbang.social/@kalleboo/116302075194704555
It wasn't really the processor architecture. Segmented addressing was actually fairly easy if the processor was used only in the way that protected mode was envisioned as working. As the headlined article observes, a lot of this stuff simply wasn't necessary in OS/2 1.x, even though that too had DLLs, callback window procedures, and the multiple tiny/small/medium/large/compact/huge memory models.
The differences were (a) that DOS+Windows was designed so that the same programs could run in both real mode, with overlaying, and 286 protected mode, with segmented virtual memory; and (b) that to really save on RAM DOS+Windows had ideas such as the data segments for DLLs being globally shared across all processes. These added all of the complications mentioned in the headlined article and more besides. It was the operating system, not the processor architecture.