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Commodore 64 RAM Disk. I remember having 64k of RAM soldered on a generic bread board with a 9V battery as backup. It made the computer ridiculously fast when y
by baldfat 10y ago
Commodore 64 RAM Disk. I remember having 64k of RAM soldered on a generic bread board with a 9V battery as backup. It made the computer ridiculously fast when you had slow floppy drives for I/O. I also made it work for the Amega but the payoff was much lower and I stopped using it because the floppy drive and hard drives were faster and the bottle neck was at the CPU.
Video Production - If I could store my video projects in a RAM Disk it really would be pretty amazing. The issue is SSD have really been able to speed up the input so much that the benefit would be much smaller. In video your write to disk is actually very small and usually only happens while you import, preview or render (Which is faster on GPU RAM). There is a lot of work to get a production RAM Disk up and being ready with a low benefit. It still would be nice to have all my clips just reside in Ram and able to "real time" render with less stutters on previews.
Data "Science" - I most use R and that is 100% in memory so it certainly has been a boom for that in my own usage. 64 GB of RAM is pretty cheap and then I can also use Spark if it isn't enough. My current biggest time restraint for big data sets is getting the sets more then anything else. Having large data sets reside in a RAM Disk would really speed things up but we now have Spark for the actual big data sets.
- Roboprog 10y agoHah. I remember using those on MS-DOS PCs back in the late 80s, as well. We put work-session data into the RAM disk, then saved it back to the hard drive at opportune times.
- yuhong 10y agoAh, the 1988 DRAM shortages where 256K DRAM costed more than $10 a piece.
- mgkimsal 10y ago1990 I paid $150 for 512k ram pack.
- specialist 10y agoProtectionist measures fueled by rising sun Japan hysteria engineered by Micron. Stagnated PC industry. Postponed transition to 386, stomped OS/2 launch. I still haven't forgiven Micron. Never forget!
- yuhong 10y agoAnd we still have Micron today. They were suffering years of losses until the DRAM market began to recover in 1987. They even bought Elpida too.
- baldfat 10y agoOS/2 shouldn't have failed!!!! To bad DOS and Windows apps ran better in VM then native OS/2 apps that would just hang 10% of the time!!!! Another reason I loved my Amiga!
- yuhong 10y agoYea, that OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics.
- specialist 10y ago"Commodore 64 RAM Disk" Oh man. I manually stuffed 1.5mb (three 512mb RAM cards) for an image capture system. My thumbs got blisters. The PC was an over clocked Tandy 80286 (8 mhz!). I forget the name of the goofy Lotus/Intel/Microsoft memory expander contraption. That Tandy was a tank. We were doing large format image capture for document archival. Totally not worth it. Results were unusable. But we had investers, so... Before that, I thought I was pretty cool pimping my Apple //e with an 80 column character display and 128kb RAM. True word processing, WYSIWYG.