Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Virtual Memory

Even before anyone conceived the idea of the first personal computer, mainframe computer designers faced the same tradeoff between memory and mass storage. Mass storage was plentiful and cheap; memory was expensive, so much so that not even large corporations could afford as much as they wanted. In the early years of computers, engineers tried to sidestep the high cost of memory by faking it, making computers think they had more memory than they actually did. With some fancy footwork and a lot of shuffling around of bytes, they substituted mass storage for memory. The engineers called the memory the computer thought it had but in reality didn't exist virtual memory. Although the cost of memory has fallen by a millionfold, memory ...