Apparently it's still in discussion but it's April now so seems unlikely.
Kind of weird how controversial it is considering DOS had QEMM386 way back in 1987.
Apparently it's still in discussion but it's April now so seems unlikely.
Kind of weird how controversial it is considering DOS had QEMM386 way back in 1987.
Found good visual explainer on this - https://vectree.io/c/linux-virtual-memory-swap-oom-killer-vs...
That's why SoftRAM gained infamy - they discovered during testing that swapping was so much faster than compression that the released version simply doubled the Windows swap file size and didn't actually compress RAM at all, despite their claims (and they ended up being sued into oblivion as a result...)
Over on the Mac, RAMDoubler really did do compression but it a) ran like treacle on the 030, b) needed to do a bunch of kernel hacks, so had compatibility issues with the sort of "clever" software that actually required most RAM, and c) PowerMac users tended to have enough RAM anyway.
Disk compression programs were a bit more successful - DiskDoubler, Stacker, DoubleSpace et al. ISTR that Microsoft managed to infringe on Stacker's patents (or maybe even the copyright?) in MS DOS 6.2, and had to hastily release DOS 6.22 with a re-written version free of charge as a result. These were a bit more successful because they coincided with a general reduction in HDD latency that was going on at roughly the same time.