[ih] vm vs. memory

Brian E Carpenter brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
Tue Oct 24 17:24:12 PDT 2017


On 25/10/2017 11:53, John R. Levine wrote:
>>> VM stopped being a workaround when people realized that you could use
>>> the same hardware to unify RAM and disk files.
>>
>> But that's exactly what ATLAS did. The one-level paper goes into
>> a lot of detail about the ATLAS o/s, and when you wrote code in
>> Atlas Autocode you simply didn't know that there was both core
>> and disk memory. (Atlas Autocode was my first real programming
>> language, ignoring a brief flurry with Titan Autocode).
> 
> I read the paper and it looked like it just gave you a big flattish 
> address space, not a file system.  Multics and TSS had file systems with 
> persistent named files.

Yes. There's no doubt that Multics was a great conceptual advance.

    Brian



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