I blame 8086 segmented memory and the rest of its horrid architecture on why no one liked programming in assembly language. There were other elegant RISC machines with flat memory models and large general register sets that were a complete joy to program. Memory paging allowed you to do everything you needed to do that segmented memory provided and left the programmer unbothered for the most part.

Nope. It was bad. It made computers in the 286/386 eras having RAM above 1MB sitting there and doing nothing. It took years to transit to DOS/4G and then finally 32bit OS Windows 95.

> What we needed, in hindsight, was to treat segments as true selectors — opaque handles with no arithmetic meaning. If you can’t assume the next segment is 16 bytes ahead, you’re forced to use segmentation as intended.

Except we couldn't. If we made each segment isolated from other, we would waste so much memory because memory are allocated in segment.

If we made each segment dynamic, we need something to manage them.

This "hindsight" is just a MMU in disguise.