Hybrid Approach: Paging and Segments

Whenever you have two reasonable but different approaches to something in life, you should always examine the combination of the two to see if you can obtain the best of both worlds. We call such a combination a hybrid. For example, why eat just chocolate or plain peanut butter when you can instead combine the two in a lovely hybrid known as the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup“Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups” by Mars Candy Corporation. Published at stores near you. Apparently these fine confections were invented in 1928 by Harry Burnett Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for one Milton S. Hershey. At least, that is what it says on Wikipedia. If true, Hershey and Reese probably hate each other’s guts, as any two chocolate barons should.?

Introducing the hybrid approach

Years ago, the creators of Multics (in particular Jack Dennis) chanced upon such an idea in the construction of the Multics virtual memory system“Multics: History” Available: http://www.multicians.org/history.html. This amazing web site provides a huge amount of history on the Multics system, certainly one of the most influential systems in OS history. The quote from therein: “Jack ...