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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> It’s believed that Karpiński paved the way for today’s common use of paging in computer memory systems.

So, I didn't know anything about the K-202, so this is very interesting to me.

However, are we sure that it influenced anything, given that only about 230 of them were ever made, and those were destroyed at the factory? How would knowledge of his team's innovations, let alone specific information, have leaked out to western computer designers from within Soviet Poland? If it did, was the mechanism... espionage, published research, what?

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From the article,

>Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing.

The British were involved in every step.

As an aside, it's really kind of nuts how much backing and investment the Communists have received from the West, including Wall Street, all the way to the Russian Revolution, and continuing to the present day.

Really goes to show that the virtue of greed can prevail over the vice of discrimination.

The Wikipedia page says it was actually segmented memory rather than paging as it is defined today.

More like both, there was a block address register (BAR) and when it was 0..63 that was selecting a core memory board. So that's sort of like segmentation but core could be paged out from and in to tape, disc, or drum. For example the OS (OPSYS) could be paged out to free up block 0 of core memory. So that's paging and even neater it was basically a page per program so independent programs could run concurrently, paging core in and out as needed. The paging was handled by controllers (disc, tape, drum) with very little involvement of the CPU (executive).

See 3.1.1, 3.3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 5, & 5.2: http://www.zenker.poznan.pl/k-202/dokumentacja/k-202-reklama...

Thanks.

Ryszard Zenker has done us all a great service with that document.

> Soviet Poland

Small correction and historical note: Poland, like the other USSR-aligned countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet regime and the regimes they installed in those countries, were not part of the Soviet Union. So they weren't Soviet, but they most certainly were communist, or rather, socialist people's republics.

Hmm, but we still got paid a visit in 1968 and had Russian nukes ready in case capitalists crossed the border.

Yeah. Paging was much earlier according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_paging . If anything he was influenced by the British he worked with.

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