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                               A sea of memory

So what exactly prompted me to create a 15M (Megabyte) linkable list of words
[1]?

The potential of memristors [2].

If memristors [3] 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 [4].

Back in college (Florida Atlantic University) [5] the workstation I used had
an incredible 1G (Gigabyte) 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.

PDA (Personal Data Assistant)s 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 [6] I'm beginning to think
that Multics was way ahead of its time.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/06/27.1
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Potential_applications
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics#Novel_ideas
[5] http://www.fau.edu/
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics#Novel_ideas

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