How Virtual Memory Actually Works: The Invisible Layer That Makes Every Program Think It Has the Entire RAM
In 1962, the Atlas computer at the University of Manchester faced an impossible problem. Programs were growing larger than available memory, and programmers spent countless hours manually shuffling data between main memory and drum storage. The solution they invented—virtual memory—would become one of the most consequential abstractions in computing history. Today, every program you run believes it has access to a massive, contiguous block of memory starting at address zero. None of this is real. ...