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It's interesting that it was apparently doing something (compressing memory pages) that made sense and was potentially useful even if poor implementation made i
by jhbadger 4y ago
It's interesting that it was apparently doing something (compressing memory pages) that made sense and was potentially useful even if poor implementation made it unstable. I remember seeing ads for SoftRAM 95, but never tried it because I assumed it was just a scam because the idea of increasing memory by software seemed so improbable.
- DominoTree 4y agoIt was written as if it would be compressing memory pages, but in reality all it did was copy them back and forth shoddily, as if they never got around to implementing a compression algorithm before shipping the software. It really was a scam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
- stuaxo 4y agoSounds like adding the critical sections would have at least stopped it corrupting data.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> because the idea of increasing memory by software seemed so improbable DoubleSpace/DriveSpace was a thing back then, so no, idea was fine. More so, a similar product made by a... competent team actually worked[0] > It's interesting that it was apparently doing something (compressing memory pages) that made sense and was potentially useful even if poor implementation made it unstable. Poor implementation made it not unstable, it made it returning wrong data. If the thread safety were implemented then it wouldn't have anything positive but at least it wouldn't crash, even in absence of a compression facilities. Alas... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35414045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35414045