Computers remember things, that's a fact. Handling the available application memory in a computer must be somebody's job, and software developers are often the ones who end up doing it. Typically a programming language or a runtime environment imposes a Plan That Must Be Followed, and while we can hope that this comes hand in hand with a Tool That Makes This Real Easy, that isn't (and wasn't!) always the case.

Join Oliver Sturm in this talk to reminisce and hear anecdotes about memory management through the ages of computer software. How did we handle it in C, and was that different from Assembler? Remember Lisp and Emacs, and its garbage collector, and how has that been improved since? What about COM Interop reference counters? Perhaps Rust has the right idea, where memory is owned and borrowed? Come along and find out - the talk will be entertaining, but we'll also learn a lot and gain some valuable insight to help us remember why today's systems work the way they do.