Modern operating systems
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Swapping is the transfer of programs or segments between main and secondary memory of a computer system. The term originated in the time-sharing systems of the early 1960s. Because there was no memory protection (q.v.) hardware to isolate multiple programs, these early systems permitted only one user program at a time to reside in the main memory. When a program reached the end of a time slice or stopped for I/O, the operating system exchanged it for another waiting program.