Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:
First up—check out this piece I wrote from the 1994 Macworld Expo San Francisco: “RAM Doubler” (10 January 1994). Developed by Connectix, RAM Doubler was one of the most magical utilities of the early days of the Macintosh. As its name suggested, RAM Doubler promised to double the amount of usable RAM in your Mac, and amazingly, it generally delivered.
That was a big deal back in 1994 because RAM was shockingly expensive—$300 for an 8 MB SIMM at a time when I had 20 MB in my Centris 660AV. For $50, RAM Doubler would double whatever you had: 8 MB to 16 MB, or 20 MB to 40 MB. It was astonishing.
I know of RAM Doubler because I heard about it in the past 15 years or so, but since I did not grow up with Macs at all, I have sentimental connection to it whatsoever. Still, such iconic pieces of software always deserve to be remembered.
Now, RAM compression is enabled by default on Windows 10, most Android devices (zram), and macOS
I find this writing style to be hilarious. Sounds like this author was young, innocent, and naive when he wrote this, as we all probably were at one point, haha. The same unquestioning arguments could be put to just about anything, like the free energy devices that youtube loves to promote to it’s home page for some reason.
Just for fun…
s/RAM/energy/
On a serious note, disk storage has always been the slowest component in the computer, so minimizing the amount of data going to disk is helpful. While I’m not sure PCs had something like RAM Doubler for mac to compress ram, utilities like stacker could also increase performance by compressing data before writing it.
We humans have built so many technologies that have been obscured over time. Here’s an article about running stacker to increase the capacity of a PCMCIA “memory card”, which had a lithium battery to persist data for a year.
http://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/16/pt160038.htm
http://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/8/ptp80030.htm
Though how many people would be rightfully careful about claims of such software, especially after… hm, I remember there was some ~DOS thing which claimed to, effectively, substantially enlarge hard disk space – but all it did was hide written data, so eventually they could be lost no subsequent writes to “free” space.
The thing is that RAM Doubler DID work, and it’s claims were verified by PC Magazine labs (the same ones who exposed the SoftRAM scam). At a time software was getting larger and getting GUIs, and thus increasing its RAM requirements beyond the capabilities of users’ hardware, any efficiency gains from RAM compaction and other tricks were more than welcome. I agree RAM compaction should had come with the OS but it didn’t.
I remember a friend of mine in university who had a memory-constrained Nokia 6670, and he was equally enthusiastic about a file manager utility he had installed that could also do RAM compaction.
Your kids will laugh at Chrome’s data compression when using “mobile data” too. In fact it already seems silly to people in first-world countries, but some countries still don’t have deals with gigabytes of mobile data, or if they do they are expensive.
kurkosdr,
I didn’t mean to say that RAM compression didn’t work, but rather it’s just the nature of the arguments themselves that seems naive “It’s not guessing at a 2:1 compression ratio…you actually see your total memory being twice your built-in memory.” Well of course it’s “guessing at a 2:1 compression ratio”. “…they’d avoid anything like RAM Doubler because it’s obviously doing strange things to memory, which isn’t safe. The answer to these naysayers is that a program like RAM Doubler either works or it doesn’t – it’s a binary decision.” Where did he come up with this stuff? I found it amusing anyways
Hmm, I think it’s wrong to classify internet bandwidth as solely a third world problem. The US generally ranks poorly compared to the rest of the world, for example. I’m not dependent upon mobile at home, but when I visit family who have no residential broadband, I have to be extremely careful to download/bring everything I need with me since downloading a single ISO leaves me with insufficient data to do my work. I get the impression not everyone realizes how much of a gap exists in many parts of the US.
I’d argue that the US is only a first-world nation by definition nowadays.
(The definition of a first-world nation is the US or nations allied with the US. Second-world nations were the USSR or nations allied with the USSR, third-world nations were neutral parties (most of these were the nations that were simply too poor to be involved in the Cold War, but Switzerland made a point of being a third-world nation).)
bhtooefr,
Well, my original point wasn’t to deny the first world status of the US, but rather to point out that even in the US internet service can still be poor. The intent was to question kurkosdr’s premise that data compression seems silly in first world countries.
Anyways, for the fun of it I looked up the definition of “first world nation” and there seems to be some leeway in terms of using it to mean highly developed countries:
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/First+world+nation
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/first%20world
I would think that most people using the terms ‘first world’ or ‘third world’ today are referring to development rather than sides in specific wars. As for me, while I’m not bothered with either definition, I would probably assume it meant ‘highly developed’ unless context clues suggested otherwise. *Shrug*
zima,
I’m afraid this reference went over my head. You mean how the free space calculation was only an estimate? How bad was it?
I used microsoft’s drivespace back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
Stac’s Stacker came out in 1990 and it was actually rather effective. This is the technology that MS then used in Doublespace. They got sued for that.
Soulbender,
I am aware of that, they used stacker at the place I worked, but at home I only had drivespace from microsoft. I don’t really recall exactly how effective either of them were, I didn’t benchmark things then like I do today. I suspect that the lawsuit is the main reason we no longer have this technology since the mathematical justification for it continued to increase further as CPUs got faster and hard disks remained slow for a long time.
Worse than an estimate, it was actively deceiving – it claimed some magical compression ratio, while the “file” was little more than a link to the original hidden on the disk. Or something like that, I remember this only from stumbling on Wikipedia article about it (searched for it a bit now, couldn’t find it :/ ) – I didn’t even have a PC in DOS days, so couldn’t have the misfortune of buying into its claims (anyways, IIRC there was quickly some lawsuit and it was shut down, luckily)
Connectix did actually release another product called RAM Doubler for Windows. I paid AUD110 for it in 1995, and I don’t regret a cent of it.
The name was *technically* misleading, and was presumably more for brand recognition than anything else. The issue it dealt with on Windows 3.x was system resources – it turned Windows from “crash-on-demand,-or-just-randomly” to stubbornly stable. This allowed about twice as many programs to run at once, so it turns out it wasn’t too misleading at all.
RDW could display the percentage remaining of the three resource heaps it managed, and what those percentages would be if it was not running. For certain task sets I knew its if-not-running figures were accurate, so I was inclined to believe the occasionally negative figures displayed under extreme testing.
There was a version (with a different name?) for Windows 95, but stability was such a non-issue compared to Windows 3.x that development stopped fairly quickly.
There was Softram 95 that did the equivalent for windows 95. There was a lawsuit because the initial version didn’t appear to do anything. I think it was a competing product though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
Haha, yes I remember hearing about that piece of shonkware. The bad name rubbing off on everyone else possibly did as much as Windows 95’s improved stability to wipe out the market for that sort of product.
There was also MagnaRAM, which was Quarterdeck’s memory compression solution. I actually use the last version of it on an old ThinkPad I’ve got that has Windows 98 SE, to avoid swapping over the PIO hard drive interface. Seems to work decently well.
I was a mac user at the time when this was released, and it really did work as advertised. It was a fantastic product at the time.