Article 3092 of alt.folklore.computers: Path: nosun!omepd!pzbaum!reed!littlei!uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!roberts From: roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The Paging Game -- request for copy (correct return address) Summary: Here's a copy Keywords: zark, grubby, paging, Thing King Message-ID: <8306@cognos.UUCP> Date: 3 May 90 19:07:07 GMT References: <10779@shlump.nac.dec.com> Reply-To: roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley) Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada Lines: 80 In article <10779@shlump.nac.dec.com> edp@jareth.enet.dec.com (Always mount a scratch monkey.) writes: >I'm passing along a request for Tom Eggers: > > I'm looking for an old description of how memory and paging work. It > was written at some university in Canada 20 or so years ago, but the > explanation was both very good and very funny so that it was spread far > and wide. The principal character was the "Thing King", who kept > track of what was in memory and decided when it should get swapped out > onto disk. >If you have a copy of this, on-line or off, please contact me (or post it to >this group). It's just amazing what a conscientious squirrel can manage to stuff into one archive! (had to grep on "zark" to find it, though.) Thanks for pointers to the original source, my on-line version was hand entered from anonymous hard-copy. Robert_S o / ---- X ----- cut here --------------------------------------------- o \ *********************** ** The Paging Game ** *********************** (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love VS!) 1. Each player gets several million things. 2. Things are kept in crates that hold 4096 things each. Things in the same crate are called cratemates. 3. Crates are stored either in the workshop or in a warehouse. The workshop is almost always too small to hold all the crates. 4. There is only one workshop but there may be several warehouses; everybody shares them. 5. Each thing has its own thing number. 6. What you do with a thing is zark it. Everybody takes turns zarking. 7. You can only zark your own things, not anybody else's. 8. Things can only be zarked when they are in the workshop. 9. Only the Thing King knows whether any given thing is in the workshop or in a warehouse. 10. The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the grubbier it is said to become. 11. The way you get things is to ask the Thing King. He only gives them out in multiples of eight; this is to keep the royal overhead down. 12. The way you zark a thing is to give its thing number. If you give the number of a thing that happens to be in the workshop it gets zarked right away. If it is in a warehouse, the Thing King packs the crate containing your thing back into the workshop. If there is no room in the workshop, he first finds the grubbiest thing in the workshop, whether it be yours or somebody else's, and packs it off with all its cratemates to a warehouse. In its place he puts the crate containing your thing. Your thing then gets zarked and you never knew that it wasn't in the workshop all along. 13. Each player's stock of things have the same numbers as everybody else's. The Thing King always knows who owns what thing and whose turn it is, so you can't ever accidentally zark somebody else's thing, even if it has the same thing number as one of yours. Here endeth the lesson. -- Robert Stanley UUCP: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!roberts Cognos, Inc. INET: roberts%cognos.uucp@uunet.uu.net (Research) Voice: (613) 738-1338 x6115 Article 3102 of alt.folklore.computers: Path: nosun!omepd!pzbaum!reed!littlei!intelhf!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!sics.se!bula!bjornk From: bjornk@bula.se (Bjorn Knutsson) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The Paging Game -- request for copy (correct return address) Message-ID: <6872@bula.se> Date: 6 May 90 20:55:22 GMT References: <8306@cognos.UUCP> <10779@shlump.nac.dec.com> Sender: rnews@bula.se Reply-To: Bjorn Knutsson Distribution: alt Organization: Bjorn's Amiga, Sweden Lines: 127 In article <8306@cognos.UUCP> roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley) writes: >In article <10779@shlump.nac.dec.com> edp@jareth.enet.dec.com > (Always mount a scratch monkey.) writes: > >>I'm passing along a request for Tom Eggers: >> >> I'm looking for an old description of how memory and paging work. It >> was written at some university in Canada 20 or so years ago, but the >> explanation was both very good and very funny so that it was spread far >> and wide. The principal character was the "Thing King", who kept >> track of what was in memory and decided when it should get swapped out >> onto disk. > >>If you have a copy of this, on-line or off, please contact me (or post it to >>this group). > >It's just amazing what a conscientious squirrel can manage to stuff into >one archive! (had to grep on "zark" to find it, though.) > >Thanks for pointers to the original source, my on-line version was hand >entered from anonymous hard-copy. [Rest deleted] Your version must have been truncated along the way. I belive this is the complete version: -----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<----- The Game By Jeff Berryman RULES 1. Each player gets several million things. 2. Things are kept in crates that hold 4096 things each. Things in the same crate are called crate-mates. 3. Crates are stored either in the workshop or the warehouse. The workshop is almost always too small to hold all the crates. 4. There is only one workshop but there may be several warehouses. Everybody shares them. 5. Each thing has its own thing number. 6. What you do with a thing is to zark it. Everybody takes turns zarking. 7. You can only zark your things, not anybody else's. 8. Things can only be zarked when they are in the workshop. 9. Only the Thing King knows whether a thing is in the workshop or in a warehouse. 10. The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the grubbier it is said to become. 11. The way you get things is to ask the Thing King. He only gives out things in multiples of eight. This is to keep the royal overhead down. 12. The way you zark a thing is to give its thing number. If you give the number of a thing that happens to be in a workshop it gets zarked right away. If it is in a warehouse, the Thing King packs the crate containing your thing back into the workshop. If there is no room in the workshop, he first finds the grubbiest crate in the workshop, whether it be yours or somebody else's, and packs it off with all its crate-mates to a warehouse. In its place he puts the crate containing your thing. Your thing then gets zarked and you never know that it wasn't in the workshop all along. 13. Each player's stock of things have the same numbers as everybody else's. The Thing King always knows who owns what thing and whose turn it is, so you can't ever accidentally zark somebody else's thing even if it has the same thing number as one of yours. NOTES 1. Traditionally, the Thing King sits at a large, segmented table and is attended to by pages (the so-called "table pages") whose job it is to help the king remember where all the things are and who they belong to. 2. One consequence of Rule 13 is that everybody's thing numbers will be similar from game to game, regardless of the number of players. 3. The Thing King has a few things of his own, some of which move back and forth between workshop and warehouse just like anybody else's, but some of which are just too heavy to move out of the workshop. 4. With the given set of rules, oft-zarked things tend to get kept mostly in the workshop while little-zarked things stay mostly in a warehouse. This is efficient stock control. 5. Sometimes even warehouses get full. The Thing King then has to start piling things on the dump out back. This makes the game slower because it takes a long time to get things off the dump when they are needed in the workshop. A forthcoming change in the rules will allow the Thing King to select the grubbiest things in the warehouses and send them to the dump in his spare time, thus keeping the warehouses from getting too full. This means that the most infrequently-zarked things will end up in the dump so the Thing King won't have to get things from the dump so often. This should speed up the game when there are a lot of players and the warehouses are getting full. LONG LIVE THE THING KING --- Bjorn Knutsson / USENET: bjornk@bula.se or sunic!sics!bula!bjornk Stangholmsbacken 44 / Phone : +46-8-710 7223 S-127 40 SKARHOLMEN / "Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the S W E D E N / blink again." -- Marvin The Paranoid Android