Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:

>       CAUSE
>       The Windows 32-bit protected-mode cache driver (Vcache) determines the
> maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM that is present when Windows
> starts. Vcache then reserves enough memory addresses to permit it to access
> a cache of the maximum size so that it can increase the cache to that size
> if needed. These addresses are allocated in a range of virtual addresses
> from 0xC0000000 through 0xFFFFFFFF (3 to 4 gigabytes) known as the system
> arena.
>
>       On computers with large amounts of RAM, the maximum cache size can be
> large enough that Vcache consumes all of the addresses in the system arena,
> leaving no virtual memory addresses available for other functions such as
> opening an MS-DOS prompt (creating a new virtual machine).

Bill Gates must've thought that, surely, no one will ever need more than
640MB of memory!

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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