I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack.
At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
RAM Doubler used the “System Memory” that could auto-expand and made applications think they had contiguous memory. I don’t know if the “compression” was a scam but the better memory management definitely wasn’t.
Also for PPC Macs, it was usually bundled with “Speed Doubler” - a much faster 68K emulator than what came with early PPC Macs. The operating system itself was also partially emulated, you did get real world speed improvements.
RAM definitely wasn’t cheap in 1994, I paid $500 for 16MB of extra RAM for my PPC 6100/60 for a total of 24MB (third party reseller). I remember in 1996 though buying a 32MB RAM stick for around $350 for the DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my 6100/60.
So it was the cloud, essentially.
I remember my first PC clone in 1992 it was a white box with a 40MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM, within 6 months or so I spent $200 on two more 1MB 70ns SIMMs.
Our high school had a small lab running Mac IIci's with 8MB of RAM and those things were probably $8K each with display, it was a big deal to get time on them. We had more physical space than money, so we had an IBM PS/1 lab, a couple of ][e labs, and my personal favorite was a networked TRS-80 Model 3 lab where the master machine had a 10MB hard disk. Those things were beasts -- we used to play some sort of a networked crossword puzzle game while wearing an onion tied to our belts (which was the style at the time). Give me 3 B's for a quarter you'd say...