I once read an article about a project that placed everything into 64KB size blocks. Any pointer within the block is 16-bit, and you can also have references to other blocks.

First advantage is that the pointers become tiny, so the objects took up a lot less space. The other advantage was that when it was time to serialize and deserialize the data, you didn't have to do any processing at all.

> placed everything into 64KB size blocks. Any pointer within the block is 16-bit, and you can also have references to other blocks.

Just reinvented segmentation

That and there are some applications that have algorithms that scale really badly to the much larger size of the address space.

That only applies to apps that allocate a ton of objects and refer to them using pointers instead of using a dynamic array with 16bit/32bit indexes