🚀 go-pugleaf

In <C0r8vp.683@news2.cis.umn.edu> davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu writes:

>Can someone who knows the history of UNIX please comment on whether the
>early versions of UNIX 'required' virtual memory in order to work?  My
>own impressions are that the PDP computers didn't have any virtual
>memory, and that most programs that were larger than memory consisted of
>a series of intelligent overlays.  (My impression is partially formed by
>experience with UNIX 7.0 on a PDP-11/34, requiring a grand total of
>10 megabytes of hard disk space, and the fact that one of the selling
>points of the VAX series of computers was the fact that they had virtual
>address space.)

>-- DPZ

I have a friend that has an old 68k machine, which runs something called
IDRIS. It's a UNIX derivate from some *very* early version of BSD UNIX, or
maybe AT&T. It boots from a 360kb floppy disk and the machines memory is only
on 1MB I think (could be 512kB though), and it doesn't use any virtual memory.

So _my_ conclusion is that they probably didn't need virtual memory in the
start, but it was added as a feature later on. (RAM was pretty expensive back
then). 

/Hasse
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