The Working Set Model for Program Behavior (Denning, 1968)
Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-10-24 digest. Area: Operating Systems. Author: Peter J. Denning (MIT Project MAC) Published: Communications of the ACM 11(5), May 1968, pp. 323–333. DOI: 10.1145/363095.363141. First presented at the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Gatlinburg, 1967. Why the paper still matters In the mid-1960s, paging was new and it was misbehaving. Machines like Atlas, the IBM 360/67 and the GE 645 running Multics could keep more programs in memory than would fully fit, by paging the parts not in use out to drum or disk....