On: What Is Null? (2010)

[sjolsen]

>especially in embedded, where you might not get memory protection!

Or where there's perfectly valid memory mapped to address 0

[WalterBright → sjolsen]

The 8086 put the DOS vector table at address 0, in retrospect a truly terrible choice. Any null pointer writes would trash the operating system.

A much better design would have been to put the system ROMs at 0, where at least DOS would survive a null pointer.