Microsoft Corp has now confirmed to Microbytes Daily that it is in the study and design phase of developing what has been dubbed OS/3, a version of the OS/2 operating system for the 80386 microprocessor (CI No 839) – but the company is talking about a 1989 release rather than late 1988 as had been suggested. As well as making use of the demand paging of the 80386 to burst out of the 16Mb bounds of OS/2, the new operating system will support multiprocessors and an enhanced, intelligent file system. The company said that it would support the 80386 instruction set and provide support for a virtual 8086 mode where the 386 processor will set up multiple logical 8088s or 8086s in the machine, describing the strategy as keeping our Windows/386 technology, marrying it with our current OS/2 technology, to form the OS/2-386 product. Since the 386 chip supports a much larger address space, we’ll be able to get 4Gb of real memory and you’ll be able to install 4Gb on each machine, with 64Tb (Terabytes) of support for virtual memory.
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