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Yeah, SoftRAM 95 was possibly the first instance of what is now known as app store spam: a heavily-advertised app that does literally nothing, but comes with si

Yeah, SoftRAM 95 was possibly the first instance of what is now known as app store spam: a heavily-advertised app that does literally nothing, but comes with significant side-effects to the stability of your system. Despite leading Windows internals experts calling this already when the product came out (e.g. SoftRAM95: "False and Misleading": https://ftp.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/pub/published/oreilly/windows/win95.update/softram.html https://ftp.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/pub/published/oreilly/windows/w...), many hobbyist pundits continued to insist this was actually a valuable product. No idea if they were paid or not, but I'm sort-of afraid they really weren't. Another instance in this category of vaporware is SpinRite. When MFM disk controllers were a thing, this tool could actually fix errors (by physically rewriting sectors) and optimize performance (by changing sector interleave). However, once IDE came along, that was all practically impossible: yet, recommendations to "fix your problem by running SpinRite" persisted pretty much into the next decade.

darreninthenet 4y ago
Just to give an opposite anecdote on that, I had a failed (IDE) hard drive several years ago that the usual tools couldn't fix but SpinRite got it going again...
- PreInternet01 4y ago
  Good for you. `ddrescue` or a vendor-specific tool would have been equally effective, yet a lot cheaper. It's quite well-known that SpinRite had no special access to vendor-proprietary IDE commands or anything, and thus... did nothing.
  - jdlshore 4y ago
    Successfully selling an expensive product is not fraud. If it worked, it wasn’t “doing nothing,” even if there was no secret sauce.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    SpinRite in its later versions basically is ddrescue from what I've read.
eigenvalue 4y ago
Wow, based on the numbers in the linked article, these guys sold ~750k copies of the software which retailed for around $35 in 1995. Even if you assume it sold at wholesale for half that price, it’s still something like $13mm without inflation adjustments, or around $25mm in current dollars. That’s a huge amount of money for an outright fraud. They really should have put people in jail for this. Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. Why not the devs, too? Didn’t they knowingly implement the fraud?
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Executives take a lions share of the upside, shouldn't they shoulder the downside?
  - eigenvalue 4y ago
    I think this is a bit different from the case of, say, the programmers who made the fake accounting software for Madoff, where it was completely obvious that it was a fraudulent application. Here, if they had actually used a real compression algorithm instead of memcpy, maybe it could have sort of worked. And they split the job up into different parts, so perhaps it wasn’t so clear to the devs that it was fake.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. This was the era of software where a product could have a single developer. That developer might have also been one of the key business leaders. It is funny to see how much modern software development has expanded to the point that nobody can imagine single developers making a product (especially a nonfunctional fraudulent product) alone.
  - 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> many hobbyist pundits continued to insist this was actually a valuable product. No idea if they were paid or not, but I'm sort-of afraid they really weren't. This pattern persists in hobby circles today. Once an idea takes hold as being true and enough people buy into it, it becomes extremely difficult to convince them it was wrong all along. Nobody likes admitting they were fooled, so they become invested in propagation the myth. I’ve even encountered this in the business world. I joined a company, discovered they had been doing something with no value (actually negative net value when considering the cost) and explained that it was a myth. The first reaction was that they couldn’t just stop doing it, because that would be tantamount to admitting they were wrong all along. They wanted me to work backward to find a new justification to continue doing it. I left.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> No idea if they were paid or not, but I'm sort-of afraid they really weren't. Pfft. https://www.tweekgeek.com/ethernet-cables/ https://www.tweekgeek.com/ethernet-cables/
nubinetwork 4y ago
Spinrite is still a better scandisk than scandisk.

darreninthenet 4y ago

Just to give an opposite anecdote on that, I had a failed (IDE) hard drive several years ago that the usual tools couldn't fix but SpinRite got it going again...

PreInternet01 4y ago
Good for you. `ddrescue` or a vendor-specific tool would have been equally effective, yet a lot cheaper. It's quite well-known that SpinRite had no special access to vendor-proprietary IDE commands or anything, and thus... did nothing.
- jdlshore 4y ago
  Successfully selling an expensive product is not fraud. If it worked, it wasn’t “doing nothing,” even if there was no secret sauce.
- userbinator 4y ago
  SpinRite in its later versions basically is ddrescue from what I've read.

eigenvalue 4y ago

Wow, based on the numbers in the linked article, these guys sold ~750k copies of the software which retailed for around $35 in 1995. Even if you assume it sold at wholesale for half that price, it’s still something like $13mm without inflation adjustments, or around $25mm in current dollars. That’s a huge amount of money for an outright fraud. They really should have put people in jail for this. Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product.

ryandrake 4y ago
> Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. Why not the devs, too? Didn’t they knowingly implement the fraud?
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Executives take a lions share of the upside, shouldn't they shoulder the downside?
- eigenvalue 4y ago
  I think this is a bit different from the case of, say, the programmers who made the fake accounting software for Madoff, where it was completely obvious that it was a fraudulent application. Here, if they had actually used a real compression algorithm instead of memcpy, maybe it could have sort of worked. And they split the job up into different parts, so perhaps it wasn’t so clear to the devs that it was fake.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. This was the era of software where a product could have a single developer. That developer might have also been one of the key business leaders. It is funny to see how much modern software development has expanded to the point that nobody can imagine single developers making a product (especially a nonfunctional fraudulent product) alone.
- 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> many hobbyist pundits continued to insist this was actually a valuable product. No idea if they were paid or not, but I'm sort-of afraid they really weren't. This pattern persists in hobby circles today. Once an idea takes hold as being true and enough people buy into it, it becomes extremely difficult to convince them it was wrong all along. Nobody likes admitting they were fooled, so they become invested in propagation the myth. I’ve even encountered this in the business world. I joined a company, discovered they had been doing something with no value (actually negative net value when considering the cost) and explained that it was a myth. The first reaction was that they couldn’t just stop doing it, because that would be tantamount to admitting they were wrong all along. They wanted me to work backward to find a new justification to continue doing it. I left.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> No idea if they were paid or not, but I'm sort-of afraid they really weren't. Pfft. https://www.tweekgeek.com/ethernet-cables/ https://www.tweekgeek.com/ethernet-cables/

nubinetwork 4y ago

Spinrite is still a better scandisk than scandisk.