We all know that "640K should be enough for everyone". But who actually set this limit? The quote is often attributed to Bill Gates, but it doesn't seem like a decision for an Operating System vendor to make. And does MS-DOS have some kind of 640K limit? Doesn't it just come from the hardware?

But maybe Bill Gates was consulted on the matter, perhaps? And if he was, by whom?

I feel we need to establish a timeline of key decisions made in the IBM PC memory architecture. When did Microsoft become involved with the IBM PC design? Was the 8086 processor already designed?

As far as I know, the 8086 has two magical addresses. The first is the beginning of vectors, which is address zero. The vectors need to be mutable, so RAM must be attached to this address. Thus each 8086 system needs RAM at address zero, the beginning of address space.

The second magical address is the Instruction Pointer reset value, the location from where the 8086 starts execution. Since that boot firmware must be fixed, there must be ROM at that address. The end of memory space was chosen for this location, address 0xFFFF0 to be exact.

Was Microsoft involved in these two decisions, which must have been done at Intel? I find that hard to believe. Who at Intel chose these addresses? Was it Stephen P. Morse, the 8086 principal architect?

This leads to the biggest question at hand, the 640K limit. Who set it? Where does it come from? I know that EGA and VGA video cards have memory at that address, address 0xA0000 onwards. But didn't these cards come, like, a decade after the release of 8086 and the first version of IBM PC?

So, was there a 640K limit in the original IBM PC? Or did that come later? Was there something attached to the 0xA0000 address in the original PC? Some original video card that was used on the PC? Something else? Who designed that hardware and chose that it would use the memory at 0xA0000?

Having designed quite a few embedded computers already back in the days when external logic was always needed for address encoding, I can kind of see how it could have happened. In my imagination it's like "Ok, I've got this RAM at zero and the BIOS eprom at 0xF0000 so where should I place the video RAM...? Hmm, somewhere near the end, I think, so I can expand the main RAM... but not at the very end so I can expand the video RAM too... let's put it a 0xA0000, it's a nice round figure... we can change it at the next PCB revision anyway... Ok, ship it." But would it have happened like this?

Was there some early consencus on breaking the continuous memory address space at 0xA0000? Who chose it? Was it some clerk behind a typewriter, making history? Some engineers at a meeting, late for a lunch appointment? Maybe some guy with a soldering iron or a wirewrap gun, hacking up the first prototype of... what?

We need to get to the bottom of this, the world needs to know!

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    From the horse's mouth, Bill Gates: "I never said '640K should be enough for anybody!'". Another quote in there: "The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from" – RobIII Oct 1 '18 at 15:21
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    @Robill It wasn't that 384K (There was actually another 64K minus 16 bytes if you turned on bit 20 of the address bus.) was assigned to other purposes. By the '90s, a lot of that "upper memory" was put to use with EMM386! It was that DOS could only load an executable into a contiguous bloxk of memory, and IBM chose to start video memory at A0000h. – Davislor Oct 1 '18 at 18:58
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    The "640k limit" (hole in contiguous RAM) was just 1 of a series of short-sighted, odd, and/or bad decisions involving the PC. Others include a) IBM choosing 8086 family over 68000. b) IBM not buying MSDOS outright instead of allowing Microsoft to co-own and co-market it. c) Intel choosing to overlap memory pointers instead of normative flat memory pointers. d) Intel thinking it would be an important feature of the 8086 to be able to assemble 8085 code, complicating and probably limiting the chip. e) Intel not realizing that the 286 protected mode would benefit from a way to go back to real. – RichF Oct 1 '18 at 21:47
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    It probably goes without saying but Intel choose 20 bits for the address bus of the 8086, which constrained the address space to at most 1 megabyte. Beyond the address pins, there are also limitations in the instruction set that assume a 20 bit address space (the mechanism of the segment registers). Other constraints, such as IBM's board design, then shrank the potential RAM from there. – Erik Eidt Oct 1 '18 at 22:41
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    @RichF: The overlapping pointers were a good design for programs that didn't need to handle individual objects over 64K. Every "linear" design I've seen on 16-bit platforms would require programs to either subdivide memory into 64K sections and ensure no object crossed a section boundary, or else add extra code for every access that could straddle a section boundary. Effective coding often required having more than two uncommitted data segments, but the 8088 design was much better than the 80286 design. – supercat Oct 2 '18 at 18:49

There was a 640K limit on the original IBM PC, but it was the result of IBM’s design decisions, and nothing to do with Microsoft: it’s the largest contiguous amount of memory which can be provided without eating into reserved areas of memory. The IBM PC Technical Reference includes a system memory map (page 2-25):

IBM PC system memory map

which is detailed on subsequent pages: the system is supposed to provide between 16 and 64K of RAM on the motherboard, then up to 192K as expansion, with an additional 384K possible in the future (providing 640K RAM in total); then there’s a 16K reserved block, 112K for the video buffers (of which 16K at B0000 were used for MDA, 16K at B8000 for CGA in the IBM PC), followed by 192K reserved for a “memory expansion area”, then 16K reserved, and 48K for the base system ROM at F4000.

DOS itself isn’t limited to 640K. Any amount of RAM (within the 8086 memory model’s limitations, i.e. up to slightly over 1MiB) could be used. This was the case in some DOS-compatible computers: the Tandy 2000 and Apricot PC provided up to 768K, the DEC Rainbow 100 and Sirius Victor 9000 provided up to 896K, and the Siemens PC-D and PC-X provided up to 1020K; the original SCP systems on which 86-DOS was developed weren’t limited to 640K either, and Microsoft kept one for a long time because it was the only DOS system they had which could run their memory-intensive linker build. On PC-compatible systems with memory available at 640K, typically provided by a VGA adapter, drivers could be used to add the memory from 640K up to 736K to the memory pool, increasing the maximum runnable program size. (This worked fine for programs which only used colour text mode, or CGA graphics.) Additional memory available in separate areas above 640K could also be added as separate memory pools, but that didn’t help run larger programs.

Note that the 640K quote is likely apocryphal.

As to why this limit was chosen, I don’t have a definitive answer, but there are a number of factors to consider:

  • the IBM PC wasn’t designed as a family of computers, at least not past the 8086 and 8088;
  • 640K was huge compared to micro-computer memory sizes at the time, both in terms of program requirements and in terms of cost;
  • the memory map was probably designed the way it was in order to provide a balanced set of expansion possibilities: a lot of memory, a decent amount of display buffers, and room for ROM expansion (in the IBM PC, there were no option ROMs; those appeared with the XT).
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    Note the right-hand side of the diagram: the 216K block is within the ROM address space, so it’s intended as room for additional ROM, not RAM. There was no graphics adapter at A0000 when the IBM was designed; I suspect the designers thought that 128K would be a nice, safe amount of address space to set aside for video. (If one imagined future graphics with 4 bits per pixel at MDA resolutions, 128K would provide just enough room.) – Stephen Kitt Oct 1 '18 at 13:45
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    The Sirius did as well offer 896 KiB. Not to mention the SIEMENS PC-D with 1020 KiB when using the 'Alpha-Card' (monchrome text adapter, which in fact was terminal on a card and only accessed via two ports :)), 992 KiB with it's monocrome card and 960KiB with the (never official delivered) colour card. – Raffzahn Oct 1 '18 at 14:45
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    @StephenKitt During the last year here on RC my answers did evolve into kind of a Short-Answer/Long-Answer combination style. Giving a shorter one first that tries to hit the point asked as compact as possible, and a longer where my inner nerd can explain all the details, so I wouldn't burst some day due the build up pressure to tell it :)) – Raffzahn Oct 1 '18 at 15:09
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    And of course the RM Nimbus PC-186 is another example of a DOS-compatible machine that provided 960KiB of RAM (64KiB was reserved for the framebuffer). – Jules Oct 1 '18 at 17:53
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    @Rui 64K blocks are nice to reason about, but I’m not sure it was really the main factor in designing the memory map — for one, the base model had 16K RAM, and there was only 40K of ROM (which included BASIC); even the XT and AT only had 64K ROM (including BASIC). The XT BIOS listing shows that the option ROM scan checks for a signature every 2K, from C8000 to F4000 included, i.e. over a range which doesn’t map to 64K blocks. – Stephen Kitt Oct 1 '18 at 21:22

Following up on the @StephenKitt answer:

CP/M put BIOS and BDOS code at the top of RAM, and IBM decided to copy that idea. Just like with CP/M systems, the plan was to raise the start of reserved memory from A0000 (640KB) to a higher value once newer chips like the 80286 arrived.

This would have worked if end-user programmers like at Lotus obeyed MSFT's guidelines. However, they naturally wanted speed, and so wrote directly to memory addresses.

This, of course, meant that all old programs -- which people paid a lot of hard-earned money for -- would instantly break, and so the range A0000 to FFFFF got permanently baked into PCs.

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    Could you expand on how that would have worked in practice, assuming well-behaved software? – Stephen Kitt Oct 1 '18 at 21:24
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    @StephenKitt Good question. I don't think there is an interrupt vector which returns, say, the start of video memory. INT 12h returns the amount of contiguous memory, in KB, starting from address 0, but presumably if less than 640KB of RAM is installed this will be smaller and not tell you where video memory begins. – Artelius Oct 2 '18 at 1:34
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    (With appropriate rules, it is possible to write real-mode programs which work fine in protected mode; Windows is proof of that.) – Stephen Kitt Oct 2 '18 at 7:03
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    @RuiFRibeiro: Unfortunately, the DOS routines for text output were more than an order of magnitude (factor of 10!) slower than optimized functions that wrote screen memory directly. Users preferred programs that could draw a screen in under 1/10 second rather than taking more than a full second, and programmers can hardly be blamed for giving users the kind of performance they want. – supercat Oct 2 '18 at 20:34
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    Also, remember there was no such thing as plug and play, so things like video cards were designed to ONLY work at a fixed location within the 1st MB. Some had physical DIL switches, but for most of them, they had no option to move around. You couldn't add 2 CGA cards for example, but you could add both a monochrome (Hercules) and a CGA card, to have 2 screens because they would always appear in different address ranges. (I wrote such a system in the early 90s). – Neil Oct 3 '18 at 13:10

Hardware choice of the IBM engineers, when they put the graphic hardware from address A0000 upward. From a software point of view it was possible to overcome the 640KiB limit if there was memory mapped into the A0000-BFFFF range. On regular PC compatibles it was quite difficult to do but some exotic hardware were able to use that. I personally used a hardware emulator based on a NEC-V30 CPU that was inserted in the Atari ST that made it compatible with a PC. It worked fantastically well and because the Atari had at least 1 MiB linear memory (mine had 2 MiB) it had memory in the A0000-AFFFF area. This allowed to have 704 KiB for MS-DOS instead of the usual 640 KiB (it was even possible to use the B0000-B7FFF area giving 736 KiB DOS memory, but that was annoying as it limited the graphics to CGA compatibility losing the MDA emulation and the 640x400 B&W Olivetti mode was also lost.).

So the limit was a hardware limit, not a MS-DOS limit (there were also incompatible PC's that had more than 640KiB like the Sirius 1 and the Apricots who had up to 896 KiB of memory under MS-DOS).

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    You're confusing your MB with your KB! This is what happens when you keep inserting lower-case "i"s, which is a stupid idea from the French. Obviously you were very wealthy to have 2MB on your ST, my first one just came with the standard 512K. Still, probably the money you saved not buying a PC partly made up for it. And you had the games! – Greenaum Sep 16 '19 at 23:55
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    Ok,, fixed the 2 instances where I mixed up the MiB and KiB. As for the i, it is because it is the way power of 2 multiples are written, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte for details. Installing the PC-Speed emulator in my Mega-ST2 was indeed less expensive than buying a PC in 1989 when it came out, even if XT's were starting to be outclassed by 286 and 386 at that time. For my usage (programming in CS class at University, it was still more than adequate). – Patrick Schlüter Sep 18 '19 at 8:47
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    Yes, I know what a "mibibyte" or whatever stupid nonsense it's supposed to be, means. It's still nonsense. Before this was invented, what, 10 years ago, we managed fine. We used binary megabytes for everything, except those lying bastards who made hard drives, who used decimal millions because it made their product seem better! There was basically never any ambiguity. If an ambiguous situation existed, you'd just explain it. "Kibibyte"! The word's an abomination! It kills the Greek structure of the word. What other science would put up with such postmodern nonsense? – Greenaum Sep 19 '19 at 3:34
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    @Greenaum: Things weren't always clear in cases that mixed bytes with other units. Would "one megabyte per second" mean "one second per megabyte" or "one mega (byte per second)"? The latter usage is actually more common, but in until things reached the "tera" prefix the differences were often too small to worry about. – supercat Feb 17 '20 at 20:40
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    @Greenaum I have seen "MB" refer to 1000 * 1024 bytes, and "GB" to 1000 * 1000 * 1024 bytes as well as 1000 * 1024 * 1024 bytes. I don't think I've seen KB refer to anything but 1024 bytes. As ugly as the kilobinary, megabinary, and gigabinary are, they're extremely useful and unambiguous. – Vatine May 6 '20 at 8:44

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