Virtual memory

On 5 Nov 2010 at 15:09, Brent Hilpert wrote: My original definition was that "virtual memory" was the ability of a system (hardware, software, whatever) to fool a program into thinking that there was more memory present than was physically the case. Johnny (and please forgive me if I got this wrong) tied it into the ability to present each user with a address space, such that two users could use the same address space, but have different data. Key was the claim that a system with more physical memory than the user could directly address still qualified as virtual memory. I don't tie virtual memory into paging or even to multi-tasking or multi-user, although I'll concede that paging is a way (albeit rather simple-minded) to implement it. The Burroughs B5000 didn't employ paging and yet I think few would argue that it did not implement virtual memory (and quite possibly the earliest commercial use of it). --Chuck