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Aucbvax.4888 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Sun Nov 1 22:14:12 1981 Re: Small Address Space >From RMS@MIT-AI Sun Nov 1 22:03:07 1981 Operating systems that do paging have special equipment designed to make it both invisible and efficient. Hand-simulating paging is a real pain even though it is no fundamental problem. Most people agree with this; that is why they want machines with bigger address spaces rather than rushing to simulate the bigger address space in the user program.

If you think that hand-simulated paging is as good as having it done invisibly by the system, you're welcome to write all your programs for 11-90's which support 32 megabytes (but can only access 64k at a time) and switch your page maps by hand. Remember that each switch will require a system call.

If you already know that an editor can use a large address space, that's good. Most people are not aware of this. Many think that a PDP-11 address space would be perfectly sufficient for the editor PROGRAM. Perhaps people on EDITOR-PEOPLE are more aware of this than the programming public.

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