SoftRAM95: "False and Misleading" (1996) | Hacker News Reader

SoftRAM95: "False and Misleading" (1996)

ftp.st.ryukoku.ac.jp

9 pointsLammy7 comments

Relevant Old New Thing: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...

Compare to Connectix's RAM Doubler for Mac which was not only legit but is so good that it's often worth installing even with compression disabled:

https://macintoshgarden.org/search/node/connectix%20ram%20do...

https://tidbits.com/1996/10/28/ram-doubler-2/

Old New Thing rarely disappoints, that article is worthily entertaining of a HN post by itself.

WOW.

I remember desperately trying to download this through a "Mass Mail" on AOL around this time. So much disappointment - you can't "magic" a 486/SX with 4MB of RAM.

See so mamy products like this.

If the product genuinely worked, it would make a natural candidate to upstream into the operating system. Better to wait for the feature to arrive there. Than to risk scams and bugs meanwhile.

Ah yes, there era of RAM compression products playing on the trend of storage compression products like Stacker coupled with the increase in RAM requirements of Chicago. RAM compression in the slow CPU era was definitely selling magical thinking to users who weren't software developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#1983%E2%80%93...

I think they also had far more basic peripheral and logic controllers. In the current era, the idea of a dedicated CPU or application specific hardware is normal an commonplace. They really just throw in cores willy nilly.

I think back in the day, this would be crazy talk. You already spent god knows how much on the super special processor. The idea of doing it again so you could use RAM is madness.

Stac disk compression started out as a CPU-consuming TSR while the STAC Coprocessor Card dedicated accelerator appeared later. That they were able to eek out minimal performance drop for on-the-fly storage de/compression was a testament to creative engineering. SoftRAM95 was merely a cheap rip-off of something vaguely similar but intent on committing fraud rather than offering anything of value.

macOS and Windows both include native memory compression that now makes sense CPU-wise for highly-compressible, colder regions that are warm enough to not swap out except under pressure.

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