this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I’m old enough to remember that my swap drives used to be on spinning drives that were slower than my gigabit fiber. Well, I’m actually older than that but still. If I really needed to run some unoptimized task that required a lot of memory I could consider trying it and walking away.
I'm old enough to remember when my first computer had a 210MB hard drive and 4MB of ram.
Fancy! My first computer had 16K RAM and saved to cassette.
Lording it over us poor Vic-20 users :( I remember wishing I could have that computer. I ended up with a commodore 64 soon after.
Nice! In case you didn't know, you can run those classic systems on emulators now, for yours it'd be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VICE
The first PC I owned was a 486 with 8MB of RAM which no one else had. I remember I could make a RAM drive and copy the entire install of games into the RAM drive and they would be so fast. Imagine being able to cache 3 floppy disks worth of data!
Joke aside, i don't think swap is worth it because i think nobody is willing to have their computer locked for tens of hours or even days for something to finish considering it's literally impossible to know if the app is working or is hung ( search the halting problem for more info).