Where does this come from, and can I check it?

The Manchester Atlas, running in 1962, gave programs an address space larger than the machine's real memory. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a technology fact?

Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

What else can I read about it?

The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

Virtual memory first worked on the Atlas computer

The Manchester Atlas, running in 1962, gave programs an address space larger than the machine's real memory Atlas used page address registers to map a program's addresses onto drum and core store, fetching a page only when it was touched. When a page was missing the machine took a trap, loaded it and carried on, a scheme known as demand paging. Almost every modern processor does the same thing with a memory management unit and page tables. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Computer History Museum

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

Technology trivia Science trivia

More facts like this

Unix time counts the seconds elapsed since 1 January 1970Computers use the Unix epoch as a standardized reference point for tracking system time Linus Torvalds released the first Linux kernel in 1991A Finnish university student published a free Unix-like operating system kernel online Processors keep small caches to hide memory delaysA cache hit costs a few nanoseconds while main memory takes about a hundred, so chips copy nearby data first A cosmic ray can flip a bit in memoryAn energetic particle striking silicon can invert a stored value, an effect called a single event upset Dynamic RAM DRAM was invented by Robert Dennard at IBM in 1966DRAM uses a single transistor and capacitor per memory bit to store digital data Magnetic core memory served as main RAM for computers from the 1950s to 1970sTiny ferrite rings threaded on wire grids stored magnetic bits non-volatilesly

Tags: memory, atlas, operating-systems

Virtual memory first worked on the Atlas computer: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: The Manchester Atlas, running in 1962, gave programs an address space larger than the machine's real memory. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.