CEMM

CEMM, for Compaq Expanded Memory Manager was probably the first so-called PC "memory manager" for Intel 80386 CPUs, able to transform extended memory into "EMS" expanded memory by using the virtual memory features and the virtual 8086 mode of the CPU.

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It was present in Compaq DOS 3.31, in 1988 or before.

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Together with IBM, Compaq was the first vendor to propose computers based on the 386 CPU and it was natural for them to develop solutions leveraging the specific features of their new hardware and in this case allowing existing EMS-compatible DOS programs to access all the memory.

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Alas, interesting features often come with less interesting drawbacks. Although CEMM was called an "expanded memory manager", it was really a tiny, protected mode, single tasking operating system kernel, also called a virtual machine monitor. It had to catch all the interrupts and all the exceptions, and to reflect them to the virtual machine where DOS ran. This slowed the machine down a little, increased the latency of interrupts and changed the behavior of DOS programs trying to execute invalid machine instructions.

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Because CEMM put the CPU into protected mode, other programs (DOS extenders) could not do this anymore by themselves. A special API, the VCPI, had to be developed to allow running DOS extender programs. The first CEMM compatible with VCPI was 4.0, provided with Compaq DOS 4.01.

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Compaq has a 1987 patent on the technology, and they were probably the creators and the first company to use it. However, over time, QEMM and 386/MAX became the standard packages. Windows/386 2.1 and later releases contained a built-in expanded memory manager (EMM386) available during Windows sessions and otherwise used for running multiple DOS virtual machines. DR-DOS 5.0 (in 1990) and MS-DOS 5.0 (in 1991) officialized the technology outside of the Windows context.

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Compaq: Compaq was a personal computer company founded in 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto. During the 1980s Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers at a low-cost. The term "COMPAQ" is an acronym for "Compatibility and Quality". It existed as a standalone entity until 2002...

Memory manager: A memory manager is a part of a computer program which accepts requests from the program to allocate and deallocate chunks of memory....

Intel 80386: The Intel 80386 is a microprocessor which was used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers from 1986 until 1994 and later. During its design phase the processor was code-named simply "P3", the third-generation processor in the x86 line, but was and is frequently referred to ...