The Advantages of Virtual Machines

On the Vax machine, there was actually a hardware instruction that would sort a list. So you gave it 16 registers as 16 operators or 16 parameters and you gave it the sort instruction. And in hardware, there were physical copper traces that did the sort algorithm for up to 16 elements. In the case of a virtual machine, everything is in software. The instructions can be simple like that ad. They can also be very complicated.