Yup, although not on the PET, which didn't have Flash. On a modern computer you might be interested in minimizing power consumption, and probably on-chip SRAM is a cheaper place to persist the between-keystrokes state than Flash, which is usually ruinously power-hungry NOR. You can keep CMOS SRAM alive on microwatts from a coin-cell battery for many years, as you probably know.
Or were you thinking about persisting consistent state for failure recovery after a power failure?
What's your top-k list?
Armando Fox's crash-only software paper is also very inspiring.
I had a response here but I think FF ate it. Weird. Top-k was my dorky way of saying top 10 paper list.
Anyway, I don't have a formal top-10 (k) list of papers I think are interesting. These two papers definitely changed the way I think and to me that was the profound self-aware meta-effect. I realized that papers can change your mind, so that is my primary criteria for interestingness. The results are amazing too, in certain fields, like Astrophysics/Biology they are answering the big questions. But the little stuff down here, these facts are staring us right in the face all the time. The new mental model or device that allowed us to see that new fact is the real innovation in human cognition. The x-rays allowed us to see inside, but the act of seeing inside enabled us to realize what other things can we "see inside of". In a way, ML is a digital x-ray, enabling us to "see inside of" things we wouldn't think about even asking.
So on the top-k list, anything by Hofstadter. Esp "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" and the papers by https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Z4y_Z3sAAAAJ and all the videos by Robert Sapolsky. Omissions are not a sleight. :)
