IBM 5150 maximum memory?

[Jim Battle]

Alexandre Souza wrote:
>> Duh, the other really stupid one: taking the 1MB memory space and 
>> putting BIOS and video where they did.
> 
>    Was that a misdesign? If I'm not mistaken this is a particularity of 
> the 8086/8088, they expect the BIOS to be in FFxxsomething :o\
> 

True the BIOS being located at the top was not the problem, but putting 
video at 0xA000.  Sure, I realize that IBM didn't expect the PC to have 
the life it did, but considering this: the TRS-80 family and many other 
8 bitters had already evolved to architectures where the memory space 
was fully RAM populated and hardware was mapped in and out as needed.

Moore's law was at the time a well known trend, and it wouldn't take a 
genius to calculate that the 16-fold increase in memory would be outrun 
in just a few years.