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RAM Doubler 2 (1996)
- psergeant 8y ago> [RAM Doubler 2] reclaims unused memory in application partitions, then compresses memory it can’t reclaim ... [it then uses] disk swapping ... as its final strategy
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- facialwipe 8y agoI remember seeing RAM Doubler 2 on the shelf at Egghead Software... AND BUYING IT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead_Software
- jhpankow 8y agoI always thought newegg was Egghead's online presence. Oops.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoRam doublers of the mid-90s were usually expensive hype. The most famous case is that of SoftRam which didn’t even try to do anything but just reported fake numbers. It was called placebo ware by some magazines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
- scarface74 8y agoRAM Doublers for Windows were expensive hype. Because of the way that classic MacOS (mis)managed memory, you (as in the user) had to specify how much memory was allocated to each program before you ran it and the memory had to be contiguous. It was easy to end up in a situation where you had plenty of free RAM but it was fragmented and you had to quit programs to free up enough RAM. RAM Doubler for the Mac helped alleviate that by “doubling” the amount of RAM the system saw and then managing the memory by a combination of allocating memory dynamically in the “System” partition and compressing memory. Another benefit of RAM Doubler for the PPC was that it could enable virtual memory (ie the modern nomenclature not just “disk swapping”) without allocating as much space on the disk.
- slededit 8y agoThere was a similar program for windows but it actually did nothing and was taken down for fraud. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
- gfosco 8y agoI was the first to file against the makers of SoftRAM. I was 15 or 16, so it's in my dads name, but it was my idea to contact a lawyer and show my proof (the relevant SYS/DLLs were just renamed Windows files, hah!). I learned pretty early in life some important things about class-action lawsuits and lawyers in general... They offered to settle for $2,000 and $35,000 for the lawyers. I said no, so the lawyers offered me $2,000 of their cut on top. So that's how it went, I bought my first car off my father, and the lawyers banked $33,000.
- emptybits 8y agoSeventeen (!) years later, in 2013, memory compression became part of OS X Mavericks. And they refer to Connectix RAM Doubler. https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doubler-to-os-x-mavericks/ https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doub...
- asveikau 8y agoThis is interesting: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#His... When I worked at MS I heard some chatter about people doing it with NT circa 2010 (I guess per this wikipedia article it didn't ship until five years later). Then after I left I heard there were Linux patches from before that (wikipedia cites 2008, with it being in the mainline tree in 2013). And then later, that Apple had also done it. It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this roughly the same time.
- dfox 8y agoThere was various adhoc hackish support for compressed RAM and swapping to various RAM-like things (eg. VRAM) in Linux since at least 2004. But around the 2010 doing such stuff started to be somewhat worthwhile for somewhat normal use cases and not only neat trick that had some questionable benefit for live-CDs and nothing much else.
- bhouston 8y agoIt is available in win 10: https://www.howtogeek.com/319933/what-is-memory-compression-in-windows-10/ https://www.howtogeek.com/319933/what-is-memory-compression-...
- jrockway 8y ago> It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this roughly the same time. I'm guessing it's due to the popularity of 64-bit address space. There are lots of pointers in RAM, and while they use a lot of bits, they don't have much entropy. So they probably compress extremely well, and with compression, give one less reason to stick to 32-bit architecture. (I don't fully understand why, but I hear that people run 32-bit OSes on 64-bit machines to save memory. As long as one process uses less than 4G of RAM, maybe it's the right optimization. But memory compression certainly changes that calculus and gives the OS vendors one less use case to have to support a 32-bit OS for.)
- josmala 8y agoHey that isn't the really impressive, but I did the same thing with DOS configuration files with only using software that came with DOS. I played a game that required 12 megs of RAM and I had 8. I used drivespace to compress the drive and smartdrive to create diskcache. The dos extender of the game automatically swapped to the disk, when there wasn't enough ram. With my set up, the game swapped, then drivespace compressed the data and smartdrive cached the data, and it never hit the disk during a combat anymore and became playable.
- anyfoo 8y agoHeh, that is actually pretty clever. By contrast, I remember people putting swap files (most prominently the Win386 one) into straight RAMDISKs, which should really just give you a net negative effect all across the board.
- smlacy 8y agoUnless the ramdisk (AKA tmpfs in modern Linux) is compressed. Many low footprint Linux installations now include swapping to zram, which is compressed. The net effect is positive since you usually have an abundance of spare CPU cycles.
- anyfoo 8y agoWell yeah, that was both josmala's (the original commenter) and my point. Putting the swap file in compressed memory (here DriveSpace+SmartDrive) can be good, putting it into a straight, uncompressed ramdisk is worse than useless.
- lallysingh 8y agoConversely making your tmp dir a ramdisk was a huge benefit for compilers, because they created lots of temp files in their work.
- tomatocracy 8y agoIf I remember correctly, this was usually done because Windows 3.x couldn't handle the full amount of RAM in the system directly for one or other reason. I might be misremembering but I recall some IO cards created a 'hole' by placing memory mapped IO regions somewhere well above 1MB (15M or so?) and Windows couldn't handle non contiguous physical RAM at that point in the address space as an example.
- threeseed 8y agoI actually remember pirating this from Hotline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications Which was another strange Mac app from that era.
- MisterOctober 8y agoI loved Hotline to the max! What a nifty little community [transgressive tendencies aside] and unique, useful associated server / client software. HL had a ton of utility, was full of creative people, and was where I learned most of my first computer skills. I think there are still a couple of trackers out there. I'd get back on HL in a minute.
- kls 8y agoHL was very interesting it took the BBS concept and moved it into the internet age. It felt very much like the old BBS dial-ups. HL brought that back for a while and I loved it as well. definitely a trip down memory lane.
- kalleboo 8y agoI picked up an old PowerMac for $10 a couple months ago which I've been puttering about with on the weekends. I was surprised to find there are still a couple of Hotline servers running out there! Someone also took control of the hltracker.com domain so just launching the original app still gets you a server list. I also tried installing RAM Doubler, but it refuses to initialize when you have 256 MB of RAM installed ("you don't need RAM Doubler" it said) Back in the day I was a bigger fan of Speed Doubler though. It had neat stuff like a multi-threaded Finder copy.
- jorisw 8y agoHotline was beautiful. It really took that Copland (Titanium?) OS8 feel to a new level.
- VonGuard 8y agoThere were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It often corrupted the darned things though... Ah, what we used to do to get another 4 MBs of RAM and 80 MBs of storage.
- poulsbohemian 8y agoThis gets to the heart of my beef when people talk about "digital natives." Being able to use a mobile phone and a web browser does not make you a technology expert. There are plenty of Gen Xers or earlier who really knew the hardware and software they were using, even if they were adults when this Internet thing came along.
- kalleboo 8y agoRecently I've been playing around with MacOS 9 for the first time in at least a decade (bought a $10 PowerMac, woohoo!) and have had a good time trying to recreate my old setup. It really brought back to me just how many shareware and freeware utilities there were that changed how some very fundamental parts of the system worked. I've replaced the behaviors of window rendering (Kaleidoscope, Power Windows), text rendering (SmoothText), scrolling (Smart Scroll), drag and drop (Gravite), menus (Menutasking enabler), etc etc. Also how unstable everything becomes once you do that! It really was the wild west and it's still fun to play with.
- angry_octet 8y agoAmazingly fast window drawing too. I'd still like to have WindowShade and sounds for it. The endless series of extensions you somehow needed, until there were multiple rows across the screen at boot. (No modern OS matches holding Shift on reboot to disable extensions as a simple diagnostic.) But I'm glad to have forgotten about handles and Carbon and having to buy your compiler -- remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Well, I was excited at the time.
- gattilorenz 8y agoWhen I was a kid my only internet access was at the local library, and for a while they only had an ISDN connection shared between multiple computers/users. Even after they upgraded to DSL, for a long time my only way to carry files home was through floppy disks. I still remember the pure JOY I felt when I found an utility that could format floppies to store 1722 KB!
- th0ma5 8y agoZRam makes my ancient Chromebook work nice with Ubuntu. I'm thinking about turning it on on an old Zotec Zbox that only takes one stick of ancient laptop ram so I'm stuck on 2gb there.
- kylek 8y agohttps://downloadmoreram.com/ https://downloadmoreram.com/
- therealmarv 8y agoNowadays Windows and Mac use RAM compression by default. Funny thing is that most Linux distros don't do that by default (which is bad for browsers). Search for ZRAM etc. if you want to know more.
- mrpippy 8y agoWe had RAM Doubler 1 and also used it on a 660AV, originally with 8MB and later 24MB of physical RAM. I remember the downloadable updates (and there were many!) could actually update the original installation floppy disk
- CPAhem 8y agoReminds me of SoftRAM, which was rated 3rd "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by PC World. It also claimed to compress memory but actually didn't do that much. It is an interesting story, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
- asdz 8y agoFor Windows, we use FreeMem & RamBooster :D I remember Windows 95 or 98 have some original tool to free up the memory as well.
- 8fingerlouie 8y agoAh the good old days, with "in DoubleSpace nobody can hear you scream" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace) Back then we did it because RAM was expensive, and there was rarely enough. Today we use it because RAM is plentiful, and swapping to RAM is much faster than swapping to disk.
- jeffrallen 8y agoI came here just to say, "wow, look at that old WAIS URL". http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL/Macintosh!Hardware/Pwr!Mac!Including!Perf/Power!Macintosh!Technology/Virtual!Mem!!Diff.!on!Pwr!Mac http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL... WAIS rocked, too bad gopher beat it. Of course, the real horror is that NCSA added the img tag to their gopher browser, and now it's the end of the Internet (news at 11).
- bluedino 8y ago>> But, as I said, these updates were all free and available on the Internet, so downloading updates wasn’t a problem for most people. Kind of surprising in 1995. I didn't think that many people had internet access. Then again, power users probably did, who would be customers of RAM Doubler.
- hateful 8y agoReminds me of Johnny Mnemonic: https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/ https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/
- angry_octet 8y agoVery nostalgic. I find it a bit much when the author says 8MB is 'only $50'. In the US maybe, could be double that in other countries. I was always drooling over the prices in US MacWorld. But also, $50 was worth a lot more back then. You youngsters with 64GB RAM and 8GB GPUs don't know how good you have it. Shoutout to Stacker, which did transparent disk compression in DOS, copied by MSFT as DiskDoubler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics