Virtual

Some time ago, while explaining the concept of virtual memory to a work colleague, I remembered something I’d seen about twenty years earlier…

Between July 1988 and September 1989 I worked at an IBM research lab in Winchester, Hampshire. This was the industrial placement part of my four-year computer science degree. I was about 20 at the time. The industrial trainees inhabited a basement room with small, ceiling-level windows that were at pavement height in the street outside. High up on one wall, near the ceiling, someone had blu-tacked a piece of paper that (from memory) read:

If it’s there, and you can see it, then it’s real.

If it’s not there, and you can see it, then it’s virtual.

If it’s there, and you can’t see it, then it’s transparent.

If it’s not there, and you can’t see it then it’s gone!

Someone had crossed-out the ‘ne’ part of ‘gone’ and written a ‘d’ above it. I never felt the slightest inclination to correct this.

__________

The paper seems to have been a home-made version of an 70’s-era IBM poster explaining virtual memory. The lab was the IBM UK Scientific Centre, a really fun place to work, and which seems to have closed in the early 1990s when IBM was having financial problems. While the world thinks that these global problems were the responsibility of the then-CEO John Akers, I can exclusively reveal that they were entirely caused by UKSC management allowing induistrial trainees unrestricted access to the stationary cupboard. I still have a stapler.