
The Thing King (1972) - dedalus
https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=TheThingKing
======
Animats
Long live the Thing King!

And, as it did in 1972, virtual memory gives you the effect of about twice as
much real memory. Back then, a megabyte of memory cost about a million
dollars. Today, a gigabyte of memory costs about five dollars. Why are we
still bothering with paging?

~~~
bjwbell
Process isolation is easier with virtual memory. Gpus went through this
transition recently or in the case of Linux very recently.

~~~
Animats
Having an MMU is fine. Paging out to disk isn't worth it. The price of paging
is erratic response times.

Note that few mobile devices page. It's a legacy of the desktop/server era.

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mturk
This inspired a project I worked on with some collaborators a while back. DOI:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10773](http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10773)
and code:
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/thingking](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/thingking)

We used it to enable analyzing trillion particle dark matter simulations a
halo at a time, as though they were local. It was fun. We made it part of the
way into implementing an fopencookie version, but ended up moving on to other
projects.

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joshu
An actual Thing King:
[https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xnyn9l0hxSs](https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xnyn9l0hxSs)

~~~
rzzzt
Very cool! There's a slight difference in the replacement strategy, though:
the narrator said that this one places the most recently zarked things on the
top.

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dang
This is great. Found the date via
[https://books.google.com/books?id=9f9uAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA196&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=9f9uAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA196&ots=UI6nn3dQ7v&dq=%22the%20thing%20king%22%20expert%20c&pg=PA195#v=onepage&q=%22the%20thing%20king%22%20expert%20c&f=false),
which also has a slightly different version of the text.

