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I always thought that RAM extending software was just a joke. wow this was real

• scarface74 4y ago
  RAM extending software for Windows was a joke. Back in the pre OS X days, you had to pre allocate a block memory that could be used by each app. You set how much memory could be used for an app in its Get Info dialog. Since each block was assigned at launch, you could have plenty of memory available, but as you launched and quit apps, your memory could be “fragmented” so the next app that was launched didn’t have enough contiguous memory. You would have to quit and relaunch apps so you had enough continuous memory. The second issue was that you needed to have as much hard drive space available as you wanted to use for swap. For instance, I had 10MB RAM on my old LCII with an 80MB hard drive. If I wanted to have 15 Mb of “virtual memory” that took up 15MB of my hard drive the minute I configured it. RAM Doubler on the Mac replaced the built in memory management system with a more traditional one. Instead of pre-allocating Photoshop for instance 4MB of RAM you could preallocate more memory and RAM Doubler would make it seem contiguous. On another note, after the PPC Macs came out, RAM Doubler was bundled with Speed Doubler that replaced the built in 68K emulator with a much faster one.