Hey that isn't the really impressive, but I did the same thing with DOS configuration files with only using software that came with DOS. I played a game that required 12 megs of RAM and I had 8. I used drivespace to compress the drive and smartdrive to create diskcache. The dos extender of the game automatically swapped to the disk, when there wasn't enough ram. With my set up, the game swapped, then drivespace compressed the data and smartdrive cached the data, and it never hit the disk during a combat anymore and became playable.
Seventeen (!) years later, in 2013, memory compression became part of OS X Mavericks. And they refer to Connectix RAM Doubler.<p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doubler-to-os-x-mavericks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doub...</a>
I came here just to say, "wow, look at that old WAIS URL". <a href="http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL/Macintosh!Hardware/Pwr!Mac!Including!Perf/Power!Macintosh!Technology/Virtual!Mem!!Diff.!on!Pwr!Mac" rel="nofollow">http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL...</a><p>WAIS rocked, too bad gopher beat it.<p>Of course, the real horror is that NCSA added the img tag to their gopher browser, and now it's the end of the Internet (news at 11).
I actually remember pirating this from Hotline:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications</a><p>Which was another strange Mac app from that era.
There was a similar program for windows but it actually did nothing and was taken down for fraud.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM</a>
> [RAM Doubler 2] reclaims unused memory in application partitions, then compresses memory it can’t reclaim ... [it then uses] disk swapping ... as its final strategy
Reminds me of SoftRAM, which was rated 3rd "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by PC World. It also claimed to compress memory but actually didn't do that much.<p>It is an interesting story, see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM</a>
We had RAM Doubler 1 and also used it on a 660AV, originally with 8MB and later 24MB of physical RAM. I remember the downloadable updates (and there were many!) could actually update the original installation floppy disk
There were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It often corrupted the darned things though... Ah, what we used to do to get another 4 MBs of RAM and 80 MBs of storage.
Nowadays Windows and Mac use RAM compression by default. Funny thing is that most Linux distros don't do that by default (which is bad for browsers). Search for ZRAM etc. if you want to know more.
I remember seeing RAM Doubler 2 on the shelf at Egghead Software... AND BUYING IT.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead_Software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead_Software</a>
Reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic: <a href="https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/" rel="nofollow">https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/</a>
Very nostalgic. I find it a bit much when the author says 8MB is 'only $50'. In the US maybe, could be double that in other countries. I was always drooling over the prices in US MacWorld. But also, $50 was worth a lot more back then. You youngsters with 64GB RAM and 8GB GPUs don't know how good you have it.<p>Shoutout to Stacker, which did transparent disk compression in DOS, copied by MSFT as DiskDoubler. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics</a>
ZRam makes my ancient Chromebook work nice with Ubuntu. I'm thinking about turning it on on an old Zotec Zbox that only takes one stick of ancient laptop ram so I'm stuck on 2gb there.
Ah the good old days, with "in DoubleSpace nobody can hear you scream" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace</a>)<p>Back then we did it because RAM was expensive, and there was rarely enough.
Today we use it because RAM is plentiful, and swapping to RAM is much faster than swapping to disk.
Ram doublers of the mid-90s were usually expensive hype. The most famous case is that of SoftRam which didn’t even try to do anything but just reported fake numbers. It was called placebo ware by some magazines. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM</a>
>> But, as I said, these updates were all free and available on the Internet, so downloading updates wasn’t a problem for most people.<p>Kind of surprising in 1995. I didn't think that many people had internet access. Then again, power users probably did, who would be customers of RAM Doubler.