IBM AS/400 did this decades ago. It has a unified address space - you only see "space" not disk/ram split.

AS/400 still exists actually, under the name IBM i. I know a person who swears by them. It's a fascinating system. There are no files, only persistent objects living in a 128-bit address space. Downside: still uses EBCDIC….

Actually single-level store concept was introduced in Atlas, used in MULTICS, AS/400. [1] Some modern and quite high-performance solutions are using this concept, e.g. LMDB [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store [2] https://symas.com/getting-down-and-dirty-with-lmdb-qa-with-s...

I'm almost afraid to see what hardware will look like in 10 years.

Don't even think about the software it will take to make it feel slow.

I'm rooting for the crapware camp to find new theories on how to make things slow.

Not so much for "traditional" desktop apps. This sort of performance isn't going to do anything for your spreadsheets or word docs. It might pave the way for some really interesting video games though!

maybe not as much from a consumer standpoint, but the types of software architectures it will enable could be a big deal