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Comment by jasonfarnon

4 days ago

"Not to mention, the idea of the OS owning the machine "

I agree--back then when computers had <=4MB or RAM I would've called hogging unused memory for some selfish speculative future use "professional malpractice".

Some of that attitude survives to this day:

When an OS uses any memory that's otherwise unused as a file cache, which is instantly available if an application wants more memory, but isn't shown as "unused": "This OS is terrible, I have 16GB of RAM but all of it is being used!"

When an OS doesn't do this: "This OS is terrible, I bought all this RAM and the OS doesn't use it!"