National Life Insurance Company
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National Life Insurance Company is an insurance and financial services company based at Montpelier in the U.S. state of Vermont. The company was chartered by the Vermont General Assembly in 1848; but did not issue its first policy until 1850. It was originally organized as a mutual life insurance company, a form of organization, whereby policyowners own the company. This format was chosen because of a general distrust of stockholder-owned businesses, a shortage capital and people were reluctant to buy stock. National Life's history has been intertwined with the history of Vermont, and its state government. As the company grew throught the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state government purchased the company's series of headquarters as they outgrew them.
On January 1, 1999, pursuant to a mutual insurance holding company reorganization, National Life converted from a mutual to a stock life insurance company. All of National Life’s outstanding shares are now owned by its parent, NLV Financial Corporation, which is the wholly owned subsidiary of the parent holding company, National Life Holding Company. The holding company and its subsidiaries are collectively known as the National Life Group.
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Virtual storage: A technique for giving programs the illusion that they have massive quantities of main storage to themselves. The technique works by allowing programs to address lots of virtual memory, but making the operating system page the required data in and out of real main store and to and from a paging device at the appropriate time. The technique enables cheap DASD to be used instead of expensive main storage. Auxiliary storage: All storage which needs a channel I/O to access it (basically cache, SSD, disk, tape, mass storage). Page: An essential process within virtual storage technology. Fixed sized blocks (typically 4096 bytes) of memory are freed up by writing their contents to a paging device until any virtual address within that block is referenced. cf. swapping. Paging: To page. Paging device: Storage used to store virtual storage pages that cannot currently be accommodated in real memory. Typically DASD, especially now that DASD controllers have significant amounts of cache memory, but drums and fixed head disk have been used in the past to provide the performance required. Swapping: The process of transferring a complete program between main memory and auxiliary storage (usually disk). cf. Page.
DASD: Direct Access Storage Device. IBMspeak for disk. When RAMAC RAID was announced, it looked like IBM had finally capitulated to the word Disk, but it was not to be
