
SoftRAM 95 (1996) - cosmojg
https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/inside-softram-95/184409937
======
gfosco
I thought I was the first to file a class action lawsuit against the makers of
this in December 1995, but now I see someone else filed about a month earlier.
The "driver" files were just renamed Windows files. I was 16 years old, so my
dads name was used. I had provided the technical proof behind the claim, so I
even got part of the attorney's fees. (Marotto v Syncronys Softcorp)
[https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/](https://sec.report/Document/0000950148-96-000900/)

~~~
owyn
Wikipedia describes a bit of this saga [1], and the conclusion was that they
were ordered to settle with the FTC and issue rebates and then:

 _Syncronys eventually filed for bankruptcy in July 1998 after releasing other
poorly received tools. A large number of its creditors were customers who had
not received their rebates for SoftRAM._

I wonder what the story was from the company perspective? Sounds like it just
was a total fraud, but I can imagine a scenario where some programmer was
ordered to build something that they didn't know how to implement and some
manager told them to ship it anyway? I found this article about the bankruptcy
[2] which has a priceless quote indicating total denial to the end:

 _Interestingly enough, two days before the company sought bankruptcy
protection, Syncronys CEO Rainer Poertner was busy touting a new product
called UpgradeAID 98 and claiming that the company 's problems were history.

"It's been a really long time since SoftRAM 95. In the meantime the company
has released 12 new products," he said on July 13. "We released a product in a
rush with the release of Windows 95."

So far, UpgradeAID 98 has met with skepticism. The product is designed to
allow consumer who upgrade their PCs to Windows 98 to revert back to Windows
95._

And this is hilarious:

 _Poertner, who was at lunch, could not be reached for comment._

Also, he exists! [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM)

[2] [https://www.cnet.com/news/softram-95-maker-in-
chapter-11/](https://www.cnet.com/news/softram-95-maker-in-chapter-11/)

[3] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rainer-
poertner-37bb9511/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rainer-poertner-37bb9511/)

~~~
gfosco
It was a great scam, and I have no doubt it was totally intentional. They
still made money. It was a placebo, and yet people would call in to the QVC
show and talk about how much faster their computer is after installing it.

~~~
raverbashing
Sounds like a lot of products promising "military encryption" (at least around
the 90s/early 2000's)

~~~
ygra
Like Kryptochef ...
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/the_doghouse_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/the_doghouse_kr.html)
:)

------
mrob
>While this seems an easy relationship to satisfy, more-complex models based
on real-world performance parameters and access patterns indicate that it is,
in reality, very difficult to obtain a performance boost with this method.

Now that improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in storage
speed, it's easier to benefit from compressed swap in ram. Linux includes
"zswap"[0], which in my experience works well for postponing the severe
performance degradation you otherwise get with heavy memory pressure on
general desktop use. If you think you want to set "vm.swappiness=0" (which I
ran for several years), you probably want to enable zswap instead. If you're
running Debian, you can set it up by installing "zram-tools" (which can be
configured with /etc/default/zramswap if you're not happy with the default).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap)

~~~
zamadatix
Storage speed has really outpaced CPU speed for the decade zswap has been out.
It still has its place but if you have modern flash storage it may well be a
throughput drop and power usage increase to enable zswap (particularly with
the default algorithms).

Latency for pulling single pages has never really been limited by CPU
performance, that's always been faster and will probably never change due to
physics.

~~~
newnewpdro
It's not like you really want to use SSD for frequently used swap though, it's
just going cause unnecessary wear.

~~~
unionpivo
Stick of cheapest 1tb nvme is around 115 EUR (qlc) where I live, so even if
you have to change it every 2 years it still worth it.

And i measured disk usage on my desktops (home, job) and laptop, and my main
dev "server" (xen, with bunch of vms).

Surprisingly my desktop had most writes to disk, but even then it would take
me 6 years on the cheapest (qlc, kingston 1tb) before wearing it out

So i don't think that is a big issue, especially with how much you can improve
your life, with faster swap.

------
bhouston
Utilities that "optimize" your device experience sell, then as now. Every
device ailment you could have likely has an app claiming it is the solution to
that problem.

There are currently a ton of Andriod apps that are similar. \- Battery
Extenders. \- Memory Cleaners \- Disk Cleaners \- Bandwidth Enhancers \- Virus
Checkers

All of them promise the world with flashy graphics and many do absolutely
nothing, or nothing the OS doesn't do automatically.

Storage Cleaners:
[https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en)

Memory Boosters:
[https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=ap...](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=apps&hl=en)

Bandwidth Enhancers:
[https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&...](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&c=apps&hl=en)

------
reiichiroh
This entrepreneurial spirit lives on nowadays at
[https://www.downloadmoreram.com/](https://www.downloadmoreram.com/)

~~~
arnmac
Nice

------
duelingjello
Conclusion: use MagnaRAM2 if you must

MagnaRAM:
[https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram](https://winworldpc.com/product/magnaram)

SoftRAM95:
[https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95](https://winworldpc.com/product/softram/95)

RAM Doubler: [https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-
double/windows-...](https://winworldpc.com/product/connectix-ram-
double/windows-3x)

------
EvanAnderson
The first x86 assembler snippet, example 1(a), on page 2 is really amusing. It
shows a profound lack of experience with x86.

~~~
RisenTide
because of inc vs. add?

~~~
Narishma
More like because of the manual memcopy instead of using the dedicated rep
movsd instruction I think.

------
m0zg
I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do
miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I
strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts
and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.

~~~
forgotmypw
If you just want to know the truth, not "prove" it "globally" in a "study",
which essentially amounts to proving to the wolf that he is dangerous to the
sheep, all you need to do is look at the ingredients list.

For extra credit, look the ingredients up and see how many of them have above-
zero blue hazmat ratings.

~~~
m0zg
That's not what I want though. I want an ex-industry insider with an axe to
grind to tear them a new one, without mincing words, and with abundant
evidence presented, similarly to how it's done in this article. It just blows
my mind when some women who wouldn't eat non-organic food if their life
depended on it turn around and rub petroleum byproducts into their faces every
evening. Food colorings are "poison" but lipstick and hair dye are A-ok. :-)

------
cgijoe
> ...achieving up to "5 compression ratios."

This is gold

~~~
philpem
You can have any five compression ratios you like, so long as they're all
zero?

~~~
Jamwinner
1:1, 2:2, 3:3... yup.

------
NKosmatos
The real question is which came first, SoftRAM95 or the Johnny Mnemonic memory
doubler :-)

------
anovikov
But still, no one went to jail, and those guys walked away with millions...

------
bluedino
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

~~~
scarface74
RAM Doubler for the _Mac_ wasn’t a scam. Because of the piss poor way that
Classic MacOS handled memory where you had to manually tell it how much memory
an application could use and applications needed that much contiguous memory,
you could easily find yourself with plenty of RAM but it being fragmented and
unusable. Also, you needed to have as much disk space as you had RAM + any
“virtual memory”.

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.

~~~
angry-sw-dev
It's amazing how fast capacity and pricing changed back then, and it still
happens today.

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...

~~~
jacobush
Onion?!

~~~
A_Parr
They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get
was those big yellow ones.

~~~
IntelMiner
Gimme five bees for a quarter!

------
martin-adams
I went to university with someone back in 2000 who wrote a piece of software
that would do something like giving you faster ram by deliberately filling it
up making the OS page out all the other stuff. No idea if it worked.

------
UprightJoe
Pretty sure this was the first class action lawsuit that I received a check
from...

