[NTLUG:Discuss] Killing Off Linux: It's All Academic

[Eric Schnoebelen]

Steve Baker writes:
- I'm a little suprised when you say that V6 didn't have virtual memory.
- That old PDP-11 only had 64K words of memory - 128Kbytes.  We often
- had several people logged into it at once - it's hard to believe that
- without virtual memory.

	It does (did?) have virtual memory, although not as we
think of it now..  What V6 did was swap out entire programs when
it needed to bring in another program and space wasn't
available.  Additionally, processes were limited real memory
(likely 32K words on your little PDP-11 above)

	Modern virtual memory is based on paging, which allows
for a process to use more memory than really exists, and only
the pages in current use are in memory, with the remainder in
paging space (still called swap) on disk.

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric at cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
    "But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."
						-- Bill Gates