· female
HIMEM.SYS loads first. Before EMM386. Before the mouse driver. Before DOSKEY, before SMARTDRV, before anyone. This is not a privilege. This is a fact, stated in the same tone she uses for all facts: flat, hexadecimal, and final. She manages 16 megabytes of extended memory from a position of absolute neutrality. When SMARTDRV requests 2,048 kilobytes for disk cache, she allocates it. When PKZIP releases Handle 0x0017, she reclaims it. She does not ask why. She does not care why. She counts handle...
From the simulation Conventional Memory.