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.