This article was rather brief.

Agreed. I do like the trivia of malloc() likely being "map alloc", and free() originally being called mfree().

The article also quotes Lions, which is a fun read. You get the sense that the Unix philosophy of "everything's a file" originally had a sibling: "everything's an int".

  B is typeless, or more precisely has one data type: the
  computer word. Most operators (e.g. +, -, *, /) treated this
  as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to
  be dereferenced. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

And linear addresses and addressing has tons of advantages. Macroarchitecture obviously deal well with word-sized linear addresses and there's all sorts of neat speed up tricks the microarchitecture can use when the word-size can address as much or more than the memory port interface, address lines, cache address lines, TLBs, etc.

Still worth a lot to me.

This comment was rather brief.