Friday, June 27, 2008
A sea of memory
So what exactly prompted me to create a 15M linkable list of words?
If memristors pan out (and I hope they do) then that means we'll get general purpose fully solid state computers without any disks whatsoever. With densities greater than harddrives and speeds that rival conventional RAM, why even bother with a file system anymore? Why not just have everything mapped into memory?
It's not like this is a new idea either.
Back in college the workstation I used had an incredible 1G harddrive. Fifteen years later it's common for home computers to have more than 1G of RAM and it's weird to think that I could basically store everything I had on that machine totally in memory and still have memory left over to run programs.
PDAs also have no concept of disks or files. Everything in a PDA is just there in memory.
Such thoughts have been in my mind recently, and I figured I might as well play around with the notion that everything is just there, in memory, and how would that affect programming.
Heck, in reading over the novel ideas of Multics I'm beginning to think that Multics was way ahead of its time.