
RAM Doubler 2 (1996) - aleyan
https://tidbits.com/article/837
======
josmala
Hey that isn't the really impressive, but I did the same thing with DOS
configuration files with only using software that came with DOS. I played a
game that required 12 megs of RAM and I had 8. I used drivespace to compress
the drive and smartdrive to create diskcache. The dos extender of the game
automatically swapped to the disk, when there wasn't enough ram. With my set
up, the game swapped, then drivespace compressed the data and smartdrive
cached the data, and it never hit the disk during a combat anymore and became
playable.

~~~
anyfoo
Heh, that is actually pretty clever.

By contrast, I remember people putting swap files (most prominently the Win386
one) into straight RAMDISKs, which should really just give you a net negative
effect all across the board.

~~~
smlacy
Unless the ramdisk (AKA tmpfs in modern Linux) is compressed.

Many low footprint Linux installations now include swapping to zram, which is
compressed. The net effect is positive since you usually have an abundance of
spare CPU cycles.

~~~
anyfoo
Well yeah, that was both josmala's (the original commenter) and my point.
Putting the swap file in compressed memory (here DriveSpace+SmartDrive) can be
good, putting it into a straight, uncompressed ramdisk is worse than useless.

------
emptybits
Seventeen (!) years later, in 2013, memory compression became part of OS X
Mavericks. And they refer to Connectix RAM Doubler.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-
doub...](https://www.cnet.com/news/memory-compression-brings-ram-doubler-to-
os-x-mavericks/)

~~~
asveikau
This is interesting:

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#His...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression#History)

When I worked at MS I heard some chatter about people doing it with NT circa
2010 (I guess per this wikipedia article it didn't ship until five years
later). Then after I left I heard there were Linux patches from before that
(wikipedia cites 2008, with it being in the mainline tree in 2013). And then
later, that Apple had also done it.

It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this
roughly the same time.

~~~
jrockway
> It's interesting that a bunch of major operating systems decided to do this
> roughly the same time.

I'm guessing it's due to the popularity of 64-bit address space. There are
lots of pointers in RAM, and while they use a lot of bits, they don't have
much entropy. So they probably compress extremely well, and with compression,
give one less reason to stick to 32-bit architecture. (I don't fully
understand why, but I hear that people run 32-bit OSes on 64-bit machines to
save memory. As long as one process uses less than 4G of RAM, maybe it's the
right optimization. But memory compression certainly changes that calculus and
gives the OS vendors one less use case to have to support a 32-bit OS for.)

~~~
willglynn
One alternative would be to define an ABI for using the x86-64 processor with
32-bit pointers. This would let everyone leave the processor in the more
modern 64-bit mode without increasing pressure on the memory subsystem.

Such a thing exists:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI)

It's been available in the mainline Linux kernel and in glibc for ages. It
also breaks any code which assumes #ifdef __x86_64__ means 64-bit pointers,
and the concept doesn't seem to attract a lot of excitement:

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MjE](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MjE)

------
jeffrallen
I came here just to say, "wow, look at that old WAIS URL".
[http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-
bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL...](http://cgi.info.apple.com/cgi-
bin/read.wais.doc.pl?/wais/TIL/Macintosh!Hardware/Pwr!Mac!Including!Perf/Power!Macintosh!Technology/Virtual!Mem!!Diff.!on!Pwr!Mac)

WAIS rocked, too bad gopher beat it.

Of course, the real horror is that NCSA added the img tag to their gopher
browser, and now it's the end of the Internet (news at 11).

------
threeseed
I actually remember pirating this from Hotline:

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

Which was another strange Mac app from that era.

~~~
MisterOctober
I loved Hotline to the max! What a nifty little community [transgressive
tendencies aside] and unique, useful associated server / client software. HL
had a ton of utility, was full of creative people, and was where I learned
most of my first computer skills. I think there are still a couple of trackers
out there. I'd get back on HL in a minute.

~~~
kls
HL was very interesting it took the BBS concept and moved it into the internet
age. It felt very much like the old BBS dial-ups. HL brought that back for a
while and I loved it as well. definitely a trip down memory lane.

------
slededit
There was a similar program for windows but it actually did nothing and was
taken down for fraud.

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

~~~
gfosco
I was the first to file against the makers of SoftRAM. I was 15 or 16, so it's
in my dads name, but it was my idea to contact a lawyer and show my proof (the
relevant SYS/DLLs were just renamed Windows files, hah!). I learned pretty
early in life some important things about class-action lawsuits and lawyers in
general... They offered to settle for $2,000 and $35,000 for the lawyers. I
said no, so the lawyers offered me $2,000 of their cut on top. So that's how
it went, I bought my first car off my father, and the lawyers banked $33,000.

~~~
yitchelle
It sounded like there is only 1 person the class action. Is it possible to
have a class action with only 1 person? Sorry, I don't know the laws very
well.

~~~
gfosco
Many others joined the class, and there were multiple suits, but most people
got like $20 each.

------
psergeant
> [RAM Doubler 2] reclaims unused memory in application partitions, then
> compresses memory it can’t reclaim ... [it then uses] disk swapping ... as
> its final strategy

------
kylek
[https://downloadmoreram.com/](https://downloadmoreram.com/)

------
CPAhem
Reminds me of SoftRAM, which was rated 3rd "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by
PC World. It also claimed to compress memory but actually didn't do that much.

It is an interesting story, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM)

------
mrpippy
We had RAM Doubler 1 and also used it on a 660AV, originally with 8MB and
later 24MB of physical RAM. I remember the downloadable updates (and there
were many!) could actually update the original installation floppy disk

------
VonGuard
There were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal
with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It
often corrupted the darned things though... Ah, what we used to do to get
another 4 MBs of RAM and 80 MBs of storage.

~~~
kalleboo
Recently I've been playing around with MacOS 9 for the first time in at least
a decade (bought a $10 PowerMac, woohoo!) and have had a good time trying to
recreate my old setup.

It really brought back to me just how many shareware and freeware utilities
there were that changed how some very fundamental parts of the system worked.
I've replaced the behaviors of window rendering (Kaleidoscope, Power Windows),
text rendering (SmoothText), scrolling (Smart Scroll), drag and drop
(Gravite), menus (Menutasking enabler), etc etc. Also how unstable everything
becomes once you do that!

It really was the wild west and it's still fun to play with.

~~~
angry_octet
Amazingly fast window drawing too. I'd still like to have WindowShade and
sounds for it. The endless series of extensions you somehow needed, until
there were multiple rows across the screen at boot. (No modern OS matches
holding Shift on reboot to disable extensions as a simple diagnostic.)

But I'm glad to have forgotten about handles and Carbon and having to buy your
compiler -- remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Well, I was excited at the time.

------
therealmarv
Nowadays Windows and Mac use RAM compression by default. Funny thing is that
most Linux distros don't do that by default (which is bad for browsers).
Search for ZRAM etc. if you want to know more.

------
facialwipe
I remember seeing RAM Doubler 2 on the shelf at Egghead Software... AND BUYING
IT.

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

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

~~~
jhpankow
I always thought newegg was Egghead's online presence. Oops.

------
hateful
Reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic: [https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-
memory-doubler/](https://scifiinterfaces.com/2016/11/23/the-memory-doubler/)

------
angry_octet
Very nostalgic. I find it a bit much when the author says 8MB is 'only $50'.
In the US maybe, could be double that in other countries. I was always
drooling over the prices in US MacWorld. But also, $50 was worth a lot more
back then. You youngsters with 64GB RAM and 8GB GPUs don't know how good you
have it.

Shoutout to Stacker, which did transparent disk compression in DOS, copied by
MSFT as DiskDoubler.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics)

------
th0ma5
ZRam makes my ancient Chromebook work nice with Ubuntu. I'm thinking about
turning it on on an old Zotec Zbox that only takes one stick of ancient laptop
ram so I'm stuck on 2gb there.

------
8fingerlouie
Ah the good old days, with "in DoubleSpace nobody can hear you scream"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace))

Back then we did it because RAM was expensive, and there was rarely enough.
Today we use it because RAM is plentiful, and swapping to RAM is much faster
than swapping to disk.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Ram doublers of the mid-90s were usually expensive hype. The most famous case
is that of SoftRam which didn’t even try to do anything but just reported fake
numbers. It was called placebo ware by some magazines.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM)

~~~
scarface74
RAM Doublers for _Windows_ were expensive hype.

Because of the way that classic MacOS (mis)managed memory, you (as in the
user) had to specify how much memory was allocated to each program before you
ran it and the memory had to be contiguous. It was easy to end up in a
situation where you had plenty of free RAM but it was fragmented and you had
to quit programs to free up enough RAM.

RAM Doubler for the Mac helped alleviate that by “doubling” the amount of RAM
the system saw and then managing the memory by a combination of allocating
memory dynamically in the “System” partition and compressing memory.

Another benefit of RAM Doubler for the PPC was that it could enable virtual
memory (ie the modern nomenclature not just “disk swapping”) without
allocating as much space on the disk.

------
bluedino
>> But, as I said, these updates were all free and available on the Internet,
so downloading updates wasn’t a problem for most people.

Kind of surprising in 1995. I didn't think that many people had internet
access. Then again, power users probably did, who would be customers of RAM
Doubler.

------
asdz
For Windows, we use FreeMem & RamBooster :D

I remember Windows 95 or 98 have some original tool to free up the memory as
well.

