Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: When did paging get into System V
Message-ID: <7892@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 14 May 88 18:13:30 GMT
References: <53@lazlo.UUCP> <142700033@occrsh.ATT.COM> <651@pyuxe.UUCP> <7878@brl-smoke.ARPA> <974@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <974@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>Letting 5 users run 3Mbyte programs on a Vax with only 4Mbytes isn't
>a significant performance advantage?

It wasn't important for the typical USG (UNIX System III) job mix.
Berkeley systems tended to be used at universities and research
institutions where tasks such as large LISP-based applications and
image processing formed a much larger percentage of the desired
job mix.  As time went on and programmers got generally sloppier,
even commercial applications starting demanding large virtual
address spaces.  This has gotten so far out of hand that some of
our most important applications won't even run on several of our
virtual memory machines these days!