8 ms·

SoftRAM 95 (1996)

187 points by cosmojg 7y ago

EvanAnderson 7y ago
The first x86 assembler snippet, example 1(a), on page 2 is really amusing. It shows a profound lack of experience with x86.
- RisenTide 7y ago
  because of inc vs. add?
  - Narishma 7y ago
    More like because of the manual memcopy instead of using the dedicated rep movsd instruction I think.
duelingjello 7y ago
Conclusion: use MagnaRAM2 if you must MagnaRAM: https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram SoftRAM95: https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95 https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95 RAM Doubler: https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-double/windows-3x https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-double/windows-...
gfosco 7y ago
I thought I was the first to file a class action lawsuit against the makers of this in December 1995, but now I see someone else filed about a month earlier. The "driver" files were just renamed Windows files. I was 16 years old, so my dads name was used. I had provided the technical proof behind the claim, so I even got part of the attorney's fees. (Marotto v Syncronys Softcorp) https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/ https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  How much did you get as part of the settlement?
  - gfosco 7y ago
    $2,000 from Syncronys and $2,000 from the attorneys fees (which totaled $35,000). That got me my first car, and a lesson... The attorneys always win.
    - lsllc 7y ago
      I'm hoping that you're actually an attorney now!
      - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
        I know several attorneys, and man, I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
        Teknoman117 7y ago
        That's become my feeling as well. I've always looked at them making a ton of money without needing to start a company and become somewhat envious (none of what I actually enjoy working on seems to be startup material). Then I see two of my friends pursue careers in law after becoming attorneys, and wow, I now think my 9-5 job for a tech giant is a better gig. They're miserable.
        mrtksn 7y ago
        Can you elaborate? What's so bad about being an attorney?
        cturner 7y ago
        Their work life is an unending series of zero-sum games. One path to happiness is to set your life up to minimise your exposure to zero-sum games, this is unavailable to them.
mrob 7y ago
>While this seems an easy relationship to satisfy, more-complex models based on real-world performance parameters and access patterns indicate that it is, in reality, very difficult to obtain a performance boost with this method. Now that improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in storage speed, it's easier to benefit from compressed swap in ram. Linux includes "zswap"[0], which in my experience works well for postponing the severe performance degradation you otherwise get with heavy memory pressure on general desktop use. If you think you want to set "vm.swappiness=0" (which I ran for several years), you probably want to enable zswap instead. If you're running Debian, you can set it up by installing "zram-tools" (which can be configured with /etc/default/zramswap if you're not happy with the default). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Storage speed has really outpaced CPU speed for the decade zswap has been out. It still has its place but if you have modern flash storage it may well be a throughput drop and power usage increase to enable zswap (particularly with the default algorithms). Latency for pulling single pages has never really been limited by CPU performance, that's always been faster and will probably never change due to physics.
  - war1025 7y ago
    As someone running older hardware with a spinning disk drive, the comment was useful and something I might consider looking into. At work I think I have a 2012-era ssd drive, that while speedy is probably pretty far behind modern drives. When things start thrashing in swap it's a bad time all around.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    It's not like you really want to use SSD for frequently used swap though, it's just going cause unnecessary wear.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      both are probably true.
m0zg 7y ago
I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.
- wwright 7y ago
  We could have a government agency to fund it, since it’s in the public interest!
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  If you just want to know the truth, not "prove" it "globally" in a "study", which essentially amounts to proving to the wolf that he is dangerous to the sheep, all you need to do is look at the ingredients list. For extra credit, look the ingredients up and see how many of them have above-zero blue hazmat ratings.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    That's not what I want though. I want an ex-industry insider with an axe to grind to tear them a new one, without mincing words, and with abundant evidence presented, similarly to how it's done in this article. It just blows my mind when some women who wouldn't eat non-organic food if their life depended on it turn around and rub petroleum byproducts into their faces every evening. Food colorings are "poison" but lipstick and hair dye are A-ok. :-)
- pizza234 7y ago
  That may not necessarily cause a significant change. I believe that for a significant share of the cosmetics users, just doing some gym and adjusting nutrition would improve looks significantly more than cosmetics. However, gym and diet change take effort, so it's "natural" to look for silver bullets. And looking for silver bullets is not about effects, it's about deluding oneself. I agree on the theory that cosmetics do little or nothing. I was reading about somebody who claimed that the the general cosmetics effect can be achieved by home-made hydrating cream, and that over the counter cosmetic can't have significant effect, otherwise they would be dangerous (e.g., large amounts of certain vitamins). However, I can't find any reference.
bluedino 7y ago
I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
- oso2k 7y ago
  You mean "8MB". :D I was a poor high school kid so that would have killed my lunch budget for at least a month.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface74 7y ago
  RAM Doubler for the Mac wasn’t a scam. Because of the piss poor way that Classic MacOS handled memory where you had to manually tell it how much memory an application could use and applications needed that much contiguous memory, you could easily find yourself with plenty of RAM but it being fragmented and unusable. Also, you needed to have as much disk space as you had RAM + any “virtual memory”. RAM Doubler used the “System Memory” that could auto-expand and made applications think they had contiguous memory. I don’t know if the “compression” was a scam but the better memory management definitely wasn’t. Also for PPC Macs, it was usually bundled with “Speed Doubler” - a much faster 68K emulator than what came with early PPC Macs. The operating system itself was also partially emulated, you did get real world speed improvements. RAM definitely wasn’t cheap in 1994, I paid $500 for 16MB of extra RAM for my PPC 6100/60 for a total of 24MB (third party reseller). I remember in 1996 though buying a 32MB RAM stick for around $350 for the DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my 6100/60.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    Speed Doubler also added multi-threaded copying to the Finder long before Apple did. Without Speed Doubler you couldn’t copy a file and do anything else at the same time (aside from switch to already-running background applications). Just that was worth the price of admission
reiichiroh 7y ago
This entrepreneurial spirit lives on nowadays at https://www.downloadmoreram.com/ https://www.downloadmoreram.com/
- arnmac 7y ago
  Nice
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anovikov 7y ago
But still, no one went to jail, and those guys walked away with millions...
UprightJoe 7y ago
Pretty sure this was the first class action lawsuit that I received a check from...
cgijoe 7y ago
> ...achieving up to "5 compression ratios." This is gold
- philpem 7y ago
  You can have any five compression ratios you like, so long as they're all zero?
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    1:1, 2:2, 3:3... yup.
NKosmatos 7y ago
The real question is which came first, SoftRAM95 or the Johnny Mnemonic memory doubler :-)
martin-adams 7y ago
I went to university with someone back in 2000 who wrote a piece of software that would do something like giving you faster ram by deliberately filling it up making the OS page out all the other stuff. No idea if it worked.
bhouston 7y ago
Utilities that "optimize" your device experience sell, then as now. Every device ailment you could have likely has an app claiming it is the solution to that problem. There are currently a ton of Andriod apps that are similar. - Battery Extenders. - Memory Cleaners - Disk Cleaners - Bandwidth Enhancers - Virus Checkers All of them promise the world with flashy graphics and many do absolutely nothing, or nothing the OS doesn't do automatically. Storage Cleaners: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en Memory Boosters: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=ap... Bandwidth Enhancers: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&...

SoftRAM 95 (1996)

187 points by cosmojg 7y ago

The first x86 assembler snippet, example 1(a), on page 2 is really amusing. It shows a profound lack of experience with x86.

RisenTide 7y ago
because of inc vs. add?
- Narishma 7y ago
  More like because of the manual memcopy instead of using the dedicated rep movsd instruction I think.

duelingjello 7y ago

Conclusion: use MagnaRAM2 if you must MagnaRAM: https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram SoftRAM95: https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95 https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95 RAM Doubler: https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-double/windows-3x https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-double/windows-...

gfosco 7y ago

I thought I was the first to file a class action lawsuit against the makers of this in December 1995, but now I see someone else filed about a month earlier. The "driver" files were just renamed Windows files. I was 16 years old, so my dads name was used. I had provided the technical proof behind the claim, so I even got part of the attorney's fees. (Marotto v Syncronys Softcorp) https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/ https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
How much did you get as part of the settlement?
- gfosco 7y ago
  $2,000 from Syncronys and $2,000 from the attorneys fees (which totaled $35,000). That got me my first car, and a lesson... The attorneys always win.
  - lsllc 7y ago
    I'm hoping that you're actually an attorney now!
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      I know several attorneys, and man, I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
      - Teknoman117 7y ago
        That's become my feeling as well. I've always looked at them making a ton of money without needing to start a company and become somewhat envious (none of what I actually enjoy working on seems to be startup material). Then I see two of my friends pursue careers in law after becoming attorneys, and wow, I now think my 9-5 job for a tech giant is a better gig. They're miserable.
        mrtksn 7y ago
        Can you elaborate? What's so bad about being an attorney?
        cturner 7y ago
        Their work life is an unending series of zero-sum games. One path to happiness is to set your life up to minimise your exposure to zero-sum games, this is unavailable to them.

mrob 7y ago

>While this seems an easy relationship to satisfy, more-complex models based on real-world performance parameters and access patterns indicate that it is, in reality, very difficult to obtain a performance boost with this method. Now that improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in storage speed, it's easier to benefit from compressed swap in ram. Linux includes "zswap"[0], which in my experience works well for postponing the severe performance degradation you otherwise get with heavy memory pressure on general desktop use. If you think you want to set "vm.swappiness=0" (which I ran for several years), you probably want to enable zswap instead. If you're running Debian, you can set it up by installing "zram-tools" (which can be configured with /etc/default/zramswap if you're not happy with the default). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap

zamadatix 7y ago
Storage speed has really outpaced CPU speed for the decade zswap has been out. It still has its place but if you have modern flash storage it may well be a throughput drop and power usage increase to enable zswap (particularly with the default algorithms). Latency for pulling single pages has never really been limited by CPU performance, that's always been faster and will probably never change due to physics.
- war1025 7y ago
  As someone running older hardware with a spinning disk drive, the comment was useful and something I might consider looking into. At work I think I have a 2012-era ssd drive, that while speedy is probably pretty far behind modern drives. When things start thrashing in swap it's a bad time all around.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  It's not like you really want to use SSD for frequently used swap though, it's just going cause unnecessary wear.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    both are probably true.

m0zg 7y ago

I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.

wwright 7y ago
We could have a government agency to fund it, since it’s in the public interest!
forgotmypw 7y ago
If you just want to know the truth, not "prove" it "globally" in a "study", which essentially amounts to proving to the wolf that he is dangerous to the sheep, all you need to do is look at the ingredients list. For extra credit, look the ingredients up and see how many of them have above-zero blue hazmat ratings.
- m0zg 7y ago
  That's not what I want though. I want an ex-industry insider with an axe to grind to tear them a new one, without mincing words, and with abundant evidence presented, similarly to how it's done in this article. It just blows my mind when some women who wouldn't eat non-organic food if their life depended on it turn around and rub petroleum byproducts into their faces every evening. Food colorings are "poison" but lipstick and hair dye are A-ok. :-)
pizza234 7y ago
That may not necessarily cause a significant change. I believe that for a significant share of the cosmetics users, just doing some gym and adjusting nutrition would improve looks significantly more than cosmetics. However, gym and diet change take effort, so it's "natural" to look for silver bullets. And looking for silver bullets is not about effects, it's about deluding oneself. I agree on the theory that cosmetics do little or nothing. I was reading about somebody who claimed that the the general cosmetics effect can be achieved by home-made hydrating cream, and that over the counter cosmetic can't have significant effect, otherwise they would be dangerous (e.g., large amounts of certain vitamins). However, I can't find any reference.

bluedino 7y ago

I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software

oso2k 7y ago
You mean "8MB". :D I was a poor high school kid so that would have killed my lunch budget for at least a month.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
scarface74 7y ago
RAM Doubler for the Mac wasn’t a scam. Because of the piss poor way that Classic MacOS handled memory where you had to manually tell it how much memory an application could use and applications needed that much contiguous memory, you could easily find yourself with plenty of RAM but it being fragmented and unusable. Also, you needed to have as much disk space as you had RAM + any “virtual memory”. RAM Doubler used the “System Memory” that could auto-expand and made applications think they had contiguous memory. I don’t know if the “compression” was a scam but the better memory management definitely wasn’t. Also for PPC Macs, it was usually bundled with “Speed Doubler” - a much faster 68K emulator than what came with early PPC Macs. The operating system itself was also partially emulated, you did get real world speed improvements. RAM definitely wasn’t cheap in 1994, I paid $500 for 16MB of extra RAM for my PPC 6100/60 for a total of 24MB (third party reseller). I remember in 1996 though buying a 32MB RAM stick for around $350 for the DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my 6100/60.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Speed Doubler also added multi-threaded copying to the Finder long before Apple did. Without Speed Doubler you couldn’t copy a file and do anything else at the same time (aside from switch to already-running background applications). Just that was worth the price of admission

reiichiroh 7y ago

This entrepreneurial spirit lives on nowadays at https://www.downloadmoreram.com/ https://www.downloadmoreram.com/

arnmac 7y ago
Nice

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

anovikov 7y ago

But still, no one went to jail, and those guys walked away with millions...

UprightJoe 7y ago

Pretty sure this was the first class action lawsuit that I received a check from...

cgijoe 7y ago

> ...achieving up to "5 compression ratios." This is gold

philpem 7y ago
You can have any five compression ratios you like, so long as they're all zero?
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  1:1, 2:2, 3:3... yup.

NKosmatos 7y ago

The real question is which came first, SoftRAM95 or the Johnny Mnemonic memory doubler :-)

martin-adams 7y ago

I went to university with someone back in 2000 who wrote a piece of software that would do something like giving you faster ram by deliberately filling it up making the OS page out all the other stuff. No idea if it worked.

bhouston 7y ago

Utilities that "optimize" your device experience sell, then as now. Every device ailment you could have likely has an app claiming it is the solution to that problem. There are currently a ton of Andriod apps that are similar. - Battery Extenders. - Memory Cleaners - Disk Cleaners - Bandwidth Enhancers - Virus Checkers All of them promise the world with flashy graphics and many do absolutely nothing, or nothing the OS doesn't do automatically. Storage Cleaners: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en Memory Boosters: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=ap... Bandwidth Enhancers: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&c=apps&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&...