As Tom Marchant has already pointed out, Hobart Spitz's view of page
stealing is mistaken.

Perhaps even more important his view of how the ASM [Auxiliary Storage
Manager] works is also mistaken.  No page that has not been modified
is paged out.  (One of the minor but important merits of reentrant
coding is/was that by segregating never paged-out code pages and
frequently paged-out data pages it reduces paging overheads
significantly.)

His post did have the virtue of reviving the [predominantly British]
term 'backing store' which has always seemed to be to be a very good,
self-descriptive one, the wider of which is now unfortunately all but
precluded by other, different and preemptive, uses of the too similar
term 'backing storage'.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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