I know this isn't news, and probably many of you already know this. However, I was recently surprised to discover that some deeply geeky friends of mine didn't know how virtual memory worked, so I pulled this out to explain it.
If only all technical documentation were half as accurate and half as engaging.
The idea of writing swap to a tape (or some other kind of "dump") both scares and intrigues me, in terms of its implications for how long some processes would have to stay running for this to be at all useful to them.