Invisible wrote:
> More like in the early days, if it didn't fit in RAM, you just couldn't 
> do it at all. 

Not even close to true. People took it into account. You don't think 
WordStar could handle a document >64K?  Indeed, the whole point of an 
external sort was to handle what didn't fit in RAM.

Nowadays, people throw processing at it and let the OS handle paging.

And of course, you still get people dealing with the heirarchy explictly, 
like google, who even deals with the heirarchy of "on a disk on the same 
machine, on a disk on a different machine in the same rack, on a disk on a 
machine in a different rack in the same building, on a disk on a machine in 
a different building in the same state, etc."

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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