3 ms·
While all “Ram doubling” software for Windows was always a scam, the original RAMDoubler for Mac wasn’t. Before OS X, you as the user had to tell each applicat
by scarface74 4y ago
While all “Ram doubling” software for Windows was always a scam, the original RAMDoubler for Mac wasn’t.
Before OS X, you as the user had to tell each application how much memory it could use by going to “Get Info” and setting the memory amount.
The memory also had to be contiguous. That means as you opened and closed apps, your memory could become fragmented and you had to close apps to free up contiguous memory. RD fixed this.
Also, if you wanted to enable disk swapping (sic “virtual memory), you had to allocate enough storage space for the total amount of memory allocated. I had 10MB of RAM for my Mac LCII and an 80MB hard drive. If I wanted 15MB of memory in all, I had to preallocate 15MB of hard drive space. With RD, you only needed 5.
The third technique was memory compression.
- 13of40 4y ago> While all “Ram doubling” software for Windows was always a scam I could be wrong, but Windows 10 and 11 have a memory compression feature built in, and I think it basically works the same way SoftRAM was supposed to, except with actual compression.
- comex 4y agoAs does macOS. Linux also supports it (zram), though I think most distros don’t enable it by default (could be wrong).
- rasz 4y agoRAMDoubler was Connectix, they had a series of amazing homeruns one after another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix
- scarface74 4y agoI bought the RamDoubler/SpeedDoubler/CopyDoubler combination. SpeedDoubler was a much better 68K emulator than was built into the first generation PPC Macs and CopyDoubler was a way of copying files in the background.
- stuaxo 4y agoRaymond Chen's analysis pretty much explains what's missing, add in the locking and actually implement the compression part and it would work.
- scarface74 4y agoThe thing is that the Mac suffered from unique technical issues that Ram Doubler hacked around. The compression feature was probably the least impactful.