Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Memories...
Message-ID: <17928@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 23 Dec 88 01:52:29 GMT
References: <8812211821.AA08476@multimax.encore.com> <1113@raspail.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 26


      Eventually we have to get away from addressing memory by dense
numbers and go to a naming architecture.  Addressing by pathname is
a distinct possibility.  This idea is not new; it first appeared in
the Burroughs 5000 and English Electric Leo Marconi KDF-9, circa
1960.  But the memories of the day were not large enough to really
require such an architecture.  

     Now that we're getting there, something like this starts to
make sense.  Imagine addresses that look like UNIX pathnames.  At
the lowest level, one has an object that is addressed sequentially,
like a UNIX file.  But in general, sequential units would be single
arrays, or at least no larger than the workspace of a single named
object.  

     Efficient implementation of this concept is quite possible.  It
requires segment registers and cacheing.

     One thing worth realizing, by the way, is that ferroelectric RAM
technology is coming.  Some, perhaps most, 16Mb RAMs will be nonvolatile.
The implications of nonvolatile main storage are interesting.  There
are both good and bad points to this.  Among other things, virus
eradication may become very difficult in an era when clearing RAM is
as traumatic as reformatting a hard disk.

					John Nagle