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It's crazy that an emulated version of a famously-buggy alpha OS running in a browser is more responsive than the host OS, but there you go. These Copland windows open at lightning speed in comparison to Golden Gate.
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> That and virtual memory were desperately needed

Didn't system 7 have virtual memory, at least for systems with a MMU? I seem to recall some applications that wouldn't run if it was enabled and also wouldn't run if you didn't have enough available ram, but I don't think I understood how to actually close applications on Mac when I ran into these... I certainly didn't know how to selectively run only the extensions needed either.... sometimes I managed to get whatever game to run on the macs in the middle school computer lab, but mostly I didn't, and had to spend the lunch period looking through cd-rom encylopedias instead.

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Mac OS 7 “Virtual Memory” was just the swap file. Fundamentally classic Mac OS had a flat memory layout with special hooks defined that did not allow for virtual memory as more commonly defined. Multiprocessing came in asymmetric and symmetric forms but really wasn’t terribly useful until 8.5/8.6 and later but by that time Mac OS X was about to show up which solved all these issues.
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Yes I should have been more precise about the virtual memory. There was something like it that could swap to disk (in os 8 i think). Anyone remember RAMDoubler? It wasn't anything like the UNIX VM that came with MacOSX.
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