Double your retro Mac's hard drive space with this one weird card...

In the 80s and early 90s, hard drive space was a precious commodity. But keeping important files on floppies or other removable media carried its own risks. One company promised to double the amount of space your Mac's drive could hold just by installing an expansion card...but did it work?
Sources:
Seagate ST-225 photo: commons.wikime...
"Bobker's Dozen," MacUser, July 1990.
"Stac To Use QIC's Data Compression Algorithm," InfoWorld, January 22, 1990.
"IBM, Stac sign data compression deal," Computerworld, April 18, 1994.
"Pipeline," InfoWorld, August 19, 1991.
"SuperDisk offers easy compression of Mac files," InfoWorld, August 5, 1991.
"Datran Add-In Doubles Hard Disk's Capacity," InfoWorld, August 8, 1988.
Datran DiskDoubler box photo: wiki.preterhum...
"Stacker Coprocessor Offers Real-Time File COmpression/Decompression Without Sacrificing DOS Compatibility," PC Magazine, March 12, 1991.
Symantec headquarters photo: commons.wikime...
---------------------------------------­------------------------------------
Please consider supporting my work on Patreon: / thisdoesnotcompute
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram! @thisdoesnotcomp
---------------------------------------­------------------------------------
Music by Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicso...) and Soundstripe (www.soundstrip...).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (freemusicarchi....

[@dr.samsung_8855]

As a person born in the year 2000, I find this channel extremely important for one particular reason. That is the history lessons I can learn from these videos through the perception of another person's experience with these machines. Or at least being around during the same time period as them. Like cars I find it fascinating and important to understand the history of our advancements in technology and to have a channel like this to exist which simultaneously makes it all entertaining/suspenseful is a great gift for future generations of computer geniuses and enthusiasts alike to observe. Thank you Collin for all the lessons and experiences you've shared with us over the years.

[@jr2904]

There's for making me feel old

[@Dragon1276]

Oh, you would not be welcome on 68kmLA. The prevailing sentiment of many of the new vintage Mac users is that people who were alive during the time don’t know what they’re talking about.

[@tarstarkusz]

Keep in mind though that there is a lot of BS in videos like this one. For example, he calls this whole compression thing "silly" and that it went away in the mid 90s. Nothing could be further from the truth and this technology is still in widespread use and on your PC if you are running any version of windows NT (which includes windows 11 and back to Windows NT 3.5 You can right click on any folder on an NT drive and compress it. It doesn't just turn it into a zip file or something, it basically becomes a live compressed folder. In many cases, it's significantly faster to use the compression. Because while decompressing the file takes processing power, less data has to be read from the hard disk and then transferred across the bus. Say you had a 1mb text file on your disk you had compressed. A text file will drop by a lot with compression and it decompresses very fast. So a 1MB file is only 250k on the disk roughly. Instead of pumping a MB across the bus, you are only pushing 250k across the bus. That's 1/4 the file transfer time. Since text is so easy to decompress, the decompression time is less than the time difference between the 250k and 1MB file transfer. Also, this compression is used in backups. It is definitely worth it for all files in a backup because the whole backup and restore process is so slow. If you get a 4 to 1 compression ratio, the file transfer time savings is even greater on a tape drive than on a hard disk.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@trekrich28 Most movies which proclaim to be "based on a real story" rarely have any even remote resemblance to the real event. usually the only part of the "true story" accurately portrayed in the movie is the names of people and perhaps the name of the town in happened in. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps the biggest one is you can never really accurately portray a story that happened over a 5 year time span in 90 minutes. No matter how much they claim a story is based on a true story, take all such claims with a *GIANT* grain of salt. Think about it. How many times have you read a book and then watched a movie based on that book and with the same name? If you've ever done this, you know it is almost never a good portrayal of the book.

[@JanusCycle]

Nice card, I hope you are enjoying using that thing. Dedicated compression hardware was certainly a thing then, I also remember all those dedicated MPEG cards.

[@hyoenmadan]

"... MPEG cards..." Which interesting enough, Sigma Designs also produced :-D.

[@vylbird8014]

For video, still is. It's one reason that h265 and AV1 are struggling to catch on: Almost every mobile device has a hardware h264 accelerator built in, but might not be able to keep with video decoding otherwise.

[@tarstarkusz]

These were nowhere near as effective as the people pushing them back then made them out to be. Most hard disks could not get anywhere near 50% compression. They also introduced complications. In some minor cases, it could actually speed up the drive though. If you can get very high levels of compression for certain file types, they would transfer from the disk to the controller that much faster. In some minor cases, the time saved in transfer was greater than the time spent decompressing.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

They lived on as pcie expansion slots in servers.

[@monsterthrash]

On-the-fly compression is still a thing and still incredibly useful. ZFS and BTRFS filesystems have it as a built-in option and even on modern systems it can give you gigabytes of space back.

[@ajax700]

Also most formats today have some kind of compression, video, audio, images, even Office Microsoft or LibreOffice. Today most file formats can't be compressed much more.

[@chouseification]

@@ajax700 is spot on - what most may not realize is that most (if not all) modern MS Office documents with the x at the end of them - i.e. docx, xlsx, etc are all actually ZIP files. Yep, you can open them up with Winzip or similar and see a folder structure with various resource files, etc depending on what you had in the document. Since they have already been compressed, you can't really compress them again very effectively (sometimes not at all).

[@The_Wandering_Nerd]

definitely. it might not do much for your documents, pictures, music, or video files, but most modern operating systems (especially ones derived from Unix) have gigabytes of uncompressed text files and binaries just sitting around that disk compression is very useful for.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@chouseification love seeing my logs etc get 1.5-1.8x compression on my ZFS NAS

[@chouseification]

@@kaitlyn__L sure which is obviously including a ton of text files and files well below a block size - i.e. things that can be concatenated then compressed sort of like a virtual tarball (tar.gz) file. If you put mostly media files your ratio will drop significantly since they are already compressed.

[@midi-sama]

Amazing to see that disk compression that we have now natively in most file system formats and that we take for granted was a concern decades ago.

[@jjjacer]

Yep i know its at least built into NTFS, although i know since windows 95 microsoft had it as an option, although they i think just bought out a competitor and integrated it into their OS (since i think dos 6.22)

[@aintaintaword666]

To be fair, the only popular file system that has integrated compression is NTFS :)

[@midi-sama]

@@aintaintaword666 for now, but ZFS and BTRFS also have builtin compression.

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Storage space is cheap as chips ... no need for compression now ... especially given that we're already paying a cost for FDE.

[@bland9876]

@@halfsourlizard9319 someone doesn't own a Steam Deck.

[@BabyFawnLegs]

One of my fondest recollections of the old school macintosh era has to be just how utterly unique and deeply personalised every macintosh user's system was. There was something really charming and special about how drastically the user environment could be altered by system extensions and add-in cards.

[@ericwazhung]

And then they switched to gray...

[@mrgrumpy888]

I miss the 90s when computers and software were more open and expandable and interesting experiments such as Disk Doubler that we got as a result of that.

[@toseltreps1101]

what are you smoking? computers were never more open than today

[@JasperTedVidalTale]

@@toseltreps1101 He probably meant that some laptops are less upgradable because the parts are soldered and have less space

[@toseltreps1101]

@@JasperTedVidalTale i don't think so. he wanted to make a smart sounding remark without actually knowing anything

[@jjjacer]

@@toseltreps1101 meh, depends, in the 80s you could get the schematics of a lot of computers, i have an appleII manual that has them in the back of it. you also didnt have things like the DMCA that legally prevents you from reverse engineering something even if you own it. sure we are getting better in some areas for open computing (thanks to the likes of the RasPi, Arduino, Framework and several others) but still mainstream consumer products today are far less upgradable, far more landfill ready at the drop of a hat. And im not talking about what us enthusiasts buy as we know what its better, im talking about the everyman, the mothers and grandmothers, the walmart dwellers. They dont look into stuff being open, all they want is something that works, and when it doesnt they throw it out as the cost of repair usually is more than the device is worth. Also with the way it is from Apple and now Samsung, if you wanted to replace your broken phone screen in the US, good luck getting the a 3rd party part past customs.

[@mrgrumpy888]

@@toseltreps1101 if you say so

[@SimonTekConley]

Staples told me that buying a 1.2GB drive was pointless because I'll never fill my 210mb drive up. It was already full at that point.

[@seanwieland9763]

Ugh, I have a similar memory of computer salesmen saying a 1GB drive was unnecessary and the 340MB drive in our 486-66 computer was “plenty”. Even with Stacker I was always running out of space. The same pattern still presents itself when a certain subset of IT people don’t understand why regular people need 64GB or more of RAM today.

[@SimonTekConley]

@Sean Wieland my daughter has been getting into 3d art, blender, etc. I went to check something on her computer and realized it was only running a single stick of 8gb ddr4. Within 20 mins i ordered more ram, and realized that we had given her a machine with only 250gb of space, that wasn't an nvme drive. Ordered new ssd as well

[@Concuber11]

@@seanwieland9763my old ass MacBook with 8 gigs of ram and a core 2 duo runs better than most Chromebooks nowadays. Also, it’s more upgradable.

[@Concuber11]

@@seanwieland9763 unless you’re running a super computer there is no reason that you need 64 GB or more of ram

[@seanwieland9763]

@@Concuber11 just running Chrome web browser with a hundred tabs open makes use of 64GB of RAM.

[@roberty.9569]

These retrospectives are great videos. Understanding where we've been helps us appreciate where we are and where we are headed.

[@interlace84]

Stacker/Doublespace/Drivespace crew, thank you for allowing me to store twice the floppy copied games on our bad cluster-filled 20 & 40meg hdd's back in the day! And for teaching me patience man that was *SLOWWWW*

[@lasskinn474]

one thing is that in later 90s bigger files tended to be compressed formats in the first place and potential to compress them further just wasn't there as much. later msdos shipped with doublespace as well, so people weren't as tempted to buy 3rd party software to dabble around with disk doubling software killing the market on pc.

[@ajax700]

DoubleSpace was a Microsoft abomination (another one!) to compete with DR-DOS which was cheaper and much feature rich including data compression and 386 high memory manager. They stole the compression technology from Stac, and lost the lawsuit from this. But they covered everything with millions of dollars as they usually do. They needed to release many releases up to ms-dos 6.22 to fix many serious issues. Disastrous "Microsoft technology" as usual, like today's Teams, Windows or etc. Best wishes.

[@sluxi]

I think there was still quite a bit of potential, even today you can make good use of disk compression despite massive hard drives and trivial access to compression

[@lasskinn474]

@@sluxi there is, in access speed too depending on the hw speeds(its faster to read a compressed thing into memory from the storage medium if the decompression is fast as its less bytes to read from the media). But usually its better that it has happens on the application level. Concepts still in use on live cd systems and a lot of embedded systems fs(in those usually on parts that are read only in normal operation). It can be handy if you're just hacking around with some code and using a folder as a crude db and stuff too, easy enough to enable nowadays on say windows per folder

[@sluxi]

@@lasskinn474 zfs on linux or freebsd makes it really easy to enable on whole datasets, btrfs has similar functionality

[@IkarusKommt]

@@ajax700 There was nothing to steal from; the compression algorithm is trivial, and the case would be laughed out of any court outside of US.

[@tarstarkusz]

This was never a "silly" idea and it is still with us today. Windows still offers to compress folders on the fly. And a specialized ASIC (made today, not the chips in the video) could probably still outperform either the Arm processors from Apple or the X86 in PCs, especially written in C, which almost everything is. Back then, this was all hand assembled and was much faster and more efficient code and the ASIC still outperformed it.

[@sluxi]

Are you expressing support for Russia's illegal invasion with your profile pic?

[@tarstarkusz]

@@sluxi NO, I was not. I had a red, white and blue icon which I have since changed. And it wasn't an "illegal" invasion. There's no such thing. States are not subject to laws. The whole concept of a war crime or a crime against peace (that would be the actual BS made up charge) waging a war of aggression has no history behind it other than WW2. What's the alternative? Should states gather a meeting and vote on it or something? The whole concept of an "illegal" war didn't exist before 1945 and largely has not existed since. All that really was, was vengeance. It was revenge and bloodlust dressed up in legalese complete with a judge and lawyers pretending they are actually doing something beside vengeance theater. We're the North Koreans ever charged with a "war crime" for invading South Korea? Was North Vietnam ever charged with a war crime for invading South Vietnam? Has the US ever been charged for its territorial violations all over the world in the last 80 years? Is Biden going to prison for bombing Somalia? Is Obama going to prison for bombing 7 different countries every single day of his presidency? Is George W being charged with crimes against the peace and waging wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq? Your selective outrage is obnoxious and based on ignorance. On the very day the Russians crossed the border in Ukraine, the US was dropping bombs on Somalia. Why aren't you bellyaching about that? I'll tell you why, because you didn't even know it was happening. Ukraine as we have seen is capable of defending itself while Somalia is not. Somalia is thousands of miles from the US, while Ukraine and Russia share a border. Furthermore, Eastern Ukraine is loaded with actual Russians who wanted to become part of Russia after their language and culture was outlawed in Ukraine. Take your fake outrage and shove it right where the sun can't shine...

[@sluxi]

@@tarstarkusz So my takeaway from your wall of pro-Russian propaganda/whataboutism is that yes you were and now you are making excuses for them. Gotcha.

[@angryshoebox]

On a related note, I remember in the late '90s playing around with StuffIt, using it to compress some audio and video clips, seeing how much I could reduce their file sizes, and getting hardly any reduction at all. That was when I realized that audio and video files must already have tightly compressed data to begin with, LOL.

[@RandomInsano2]

I made thorough use of DoubleSpace in Windows 95 on a 486 SX. It was certainly worth it as I was too young to afford new hardware at the time and it helped immensely.

[@y0sh1rulez]

I remember buying a copy of Stacker for my Mac LC II to have enough space to install King’s Quest VI since as a kid I couldn’t afford buying any hardware. It slowed disk access but it actually worked and was happy to be able to play the game at the time.

[@chrishahn3834]

All these years of compressing data and I still haven't paid for WinRAR. Thanks, WinRAR!

[@Sb129]

I remember using Windows Disk Compression on one of my old computers, it is kind of wild to think of that being a dedicated piece of hardware.

[@IkarusKommt]

Macs at those days have a really shitty Motorola 68k CPUs; they couldn't do much.

[@TheOriginalCollectorA1303]

Software and dedicated hardware like this is an awesome addition for any 90s machine. The simple task of compressing files was anything but simple during this time, yet it seems more fun to do something like this on a 90s Mac or PC. It might be slow compared to a modern machine, but they show how different computing used to be. Upgrading machines to the max and installing as many cards as the case can hold!

[@MichaelEilers]

That 90s time period was the peak of Utilities software, from StuffIt and Compact Pro to the awesome Now Utilities suite and the hundreds of systems extensions you could get. The extensible nature of Mac OS 7, 8, and 9 was just amazing, as developers made up for missing features and options faster than Apple could add them. Now Utilities in particular was like buying a new Mac, they were so powerful and useful.

[@deadleads]

Damn, disk doubler got four and a half rats, thats almost as good as my local take away.

[@volvo09]

4 and a half rat kabobs is a meal.

[@deadleads]

@@volvo09 but if two people buy, one guy is getting one extra helping of rat ass.

[@jondonnelly4831]

These days the big files are mostly media which are usually in a compressed format and don't benefit from further compression but back in the 90s it did help as hard disk space was so low.

[@rigues]

As I was watching this video, Amazon delivered a 512 GB micro SD card for my wife's phone. HALF A TERABYTE. On a phone. For someone who was saving computer programs to cassete tape during the 80's, that is mind blowing. I vividly remember the first hard disk I ever saw, a 10 MB unit installed on an IBM PC-XT Clone in 1992. I used software-based data compression on my HP Omnibook 600 laptop, which had a 260 MB (uncompressed) PCMCIA Type II hard drive. The extra space (almost 500 MB compressed) surely was worth the performance hit!

[@jcfawerd]

DiskDoubler and Ram Doubler were must-haves for mac

[@SimonTekConley]

Reminds me of the addon cards that allowed you to add more ram via an expansion slot

[@bradnelson3595]

I remember DiskDoubler well. I might even have used it back in the day. But I don't remember the hardware card. That's new to me. Very interesting.

[@JustHackingAround]

Really enjoyed this, I remember we bought a lot of this software back in the early to mid 90s, but hadn't heard of the related hardware cards you mentioned so that was novel. The 90s truly were a great time to be a teenager interested in technology!

[@dotapark]

I remember someone looking at those huge sized video games and said "it's sad to see the art of compression is dying", and that person might be refer the things like this.

[@kaitlyn__L]

It’s interesting to compare this to modern cloud storage subscriptions that get sold. Since a lot of phones are deliberately sold with little space, expecting music streaming and cloud storage of photos to pick up the slack. It’s ridiculous that 16GB phones are sold when the minimum should be 128GB nowadays, especially since the price differential between those models gets eaten quickly by those subscriptions. Of course, a lot of the space-guzzling files we have now are already maximally compressed, so these programs are only useful for composing program files and associated logs, preferences, etc. Still can save a bit of space, and but certainly not worth charging for. Saving a few GB, compared against the market rate for SD cards, would save maybe 50 cents. For a lot of people the time spent setting it up can be worth more than that. Heh, I just noticed your demo of compressing a JPEG. At least it’s just zero savings rather than negative savings, as I’ve seen sometimes!

[@kFY514]

Oh the early 90s, time of on-the-fly file system compression. The time when we were willingly giving up performance for storage space, because processors were cheap-ish but hard drives were expensive. Literally the opposite of today.

[@angrydove4067]

The Amiga had PowerPacker which was similar and saved me from buying a larger hard drive, back in the day. It was transparent in its operation.

[@seanwieland9763]

6:54 Woah! 🤯 Everyone used Stacker and QEMM386 in the first half of the 1990s, but I never knew they had an ISA acceleration card for it!

[@Streaml1neJMoose]

100% agree that the 90's and even early 2000's were far FAR more interesting times for commodity computing hardware. Far more headaches as well, but worth it IMO for all the creative ways you could solve problems back then. Hardware nowadays is pretty boring and generic in comparison.

[@MaxOakland]

That’s a cool idea! Seems to me the background/auto compression is pretty much necessary for this to be a very good product

[@Markimark151]

This compression card is cool for compressing large amounts of data like for games, since lot of video games requires lots of free disk space. But since it doesn’t work for multimedia files, it’s kind of pointless and you’re just better off using external drives for photos and video files!

[@robsquared2]

I remember doing disk compression on floppy disks in windows 98. I got 5gb of text files, and was really sad when the 95 PCs at school didn't read it.

[@bhirawamaylana466]

Can I ask how you put 5gb text files on floppy disk ?

[@Nukle0n]

@@bhirawamaylana466 probably by making a 5gb file that's all 0 or any random ASCII character just repeated, it'll compress to almost nothing

[@mattb9664]

I remember seeing those Disk Doubler boxes at my school back then. Pretty interesting!

[@gamerzer0004]

Love these 80s-90s videos of cutting edge tech 🤓 I used Stacker on my DOS PC back then... Can't remember if it was effective or not

[@tarstarkusz]

Stuffit for Mac and PKZip for PCs were not primarily for saving space, but for file transfers and this was especially true pre widespread internet access. Dial up BBSs were slow. The fastest modems were 9600 baud around 1990 (14.4 may have been around, but was not widespread if it was. I just don't recall the year 14.4 modems came out) Stuffit played an important additional role. Mac files cannot leave the Mac FS without being corrupted. Even though file transfer protocols like Z Modem and Y Modem auto-wrapped 8 bit files into 7 bit files for the transfer, they did not preserve the dual fork or data format of a Mac file. But a sit file had all this data inside the sit file. So long as you could decompress the sit file on a Mac, the files would be preserved.

[@applesushi]

I was an avid user of DiskDoubler and AutoDoubler. I would’ve loved this add-on card. I don’t know why I don’t remember it being available.

[@joetheman74]

I still us on the fly disk compression on Linux. Not on my main system drive. I have an external USB 3.0 1 TB 7200 rpm spinning drive formatted with the BTRFS file system which supports on the fly compression and decompression. I have my TimeShift (like System Restore but for Linux) set up for automatic weekly backups of important files and once a month I do an fsarchiver dump of my entire /home/user which I keep on it's own partition. The entire partition is about 228 gigs and on the compressed drive the backup sits at just 150 gigs. The entire backup only takes about an hour and can run in the background while I use the PC.

[@JoshuaDominic]

I could see this being a thing again in the age where Apple is still shipping 256GB base SSD storage.

[@Sassquatch0]

Video idea...? - this type of add-in, reminds me of the early days of DVD on PC, When you needed a dedicated decoder card. I had a Creative DXR2 card for the longest time. It was such a mess, wiring up the video pass-through, getting native CD-audio from the drive to the sound card and decoder card. As a bonus, the Creative player software that ran with this card could even pick up & play 'deleted' files on a drive, (before the bits were actually written over).

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Oh yeah. IIci was an awesome machine. Don’t forget SuperDisk!

[@hyoenmadan]

Probably Stacker for Mac could use this SigmaDesigns accelerator too. I remember Stacker for DOS could use addon accelerators as long as the chip on them was Stac one too.

[@seanwieland9763]

I remember everyone using Stacker and QEMM386 in the early 90s on PC, but had no idea there were accelerator cards for them.

[@moviebod]

And then of course there was DriveSpace (originally called DoubleSpace) on Microsoft DOS 6.0 up to Windows ME, which compressed data into a single file and if that got corrupted you lost it all - see Wkipedia's description below. I lost a lot of data once. Wikipedia: the user would have one hard drive in the computer, with all the space allocated to one partition (usually as drive C:). The software would compress the entire partition contents into one large file in the root directory. On booting the system, the driver would allocate this large file as drive C:, enabling files to be accessed as normal.

[@6581punk]

On the Amiga we had crunchers which were free and fast. Often written by the demo scene coders or pirates to compress games so they could add their crack intros.

[@DonMr]

My First computer has a 10 GB hard Drive. The usable storage was like 8 GB. It come with a custom version of Windows XP, for old computers. I don't remenber all the specs, but It have a amd CPU at 500mhz and 256mb of RAM. I played KZbin back in the day and ran ok in Firefox. The hard Drive died. One thing that doesn't have was USB, a red USB board was install but never worked. The good think is that Office was preinstall. That the real mistery.

[@cwaldrip]

Unfortunately for ages Apple used the 'faster' SCSI standard, and those drives were more expensive than PATA or SATA drives. DiskDoubler and similar utilities were great. Of course Apple finally moved to SATA/IDE drives and drive prices were falling by then anyways.

[@Choralone422]

Ahh the early 90's when HDD compression was all the rage. I was thankful my 486 PC came with a 260 MB HDD which at that time was quite large. While I extensively used the PKzip and ARJ file compressors to shrink mostly games down to fit on multiple floppy disks to share with friends I never did get into compressing a whole partition or a whole HDD. I had friends who at the time had computers with 40-105 MB HDDs that did try things like Stacker and DoubleSpace and often times had horror stories to back up their experience. I still remember purchasing a Western Digital 1.2 GB HDD in June of 1996 and paying a little over $400 for it. At that time 1.2 GB seemed like a MASSIVE amount of storage!

[@AsbestosMuffins]

I remember one job I worked we had an xp machine with a 300 gig HDD that recorded data from a test rig, they had about 5 years worth of production data on there and it had about 10 gigs left free. they refused to give us any options for archiving the data off the machine, or additional hdds to expand its storage, so I turned on every single compression thing built into XP, that poor optiplex had nearly every file compressed except the absolute minimum for the OS and the test recording software. Not sure what happened to it but its replacement only spat out a 500mb file on each successful test

[@moot6794]

I love that SuperDisk 2.0 from Alysis Software Corp. has a mailing address at some random house in the Sunset District of San Francisco 😂

[@ckbwtf]

Oddly enough, HPE Simplivity still uses a PCI-E card with an ASIC for compression and deduplication to free up the CPU for VM workloads. They’ve been talking about getting rid of that card for 7 years now, but I don’t think there’s been much movement there

[@TheSulross]

well now the cousin to storage compression is encrypted data storage - which is certainly a thing. Each transforms the data that is being persisted - with transparency to the user being requisties (other than, say, the user perhaps designating volmues or folders to be compressed or encrypted).

[@TheSulross]

oh, and these days businesses are permanently retaining daily generated business data - for data antalitics and machine learning. So, even when there are terabytes of storage, compressing data that is being prrmanently retained is still very worthwhile. Data I deal with compresses 18:1. So that is a lot less space consumed (wasted).

[@the_kombinator]

I had 42 Mb on my first 386. I had to play the diskette swap game all the time to free up space on the hard disk for other applications. Then when I got my first 212 Mb drive, I was like, I'm never filling this up! Within a week it was full. I didn't realize I had THAT many diskettes....

[@Nobe_Oddy]

I'm surprised you didn't mention that today Windows allows you to natively compress file, folder, and even whole drive just by checking a button and will do it all in the background without you noticing. :)

[@DeschutesCore]

Dealing with the fallout after compression corrupted your files and THEN deleted the original... good times.

[@beastworm]

8:33 "pheraps just a bit ahead of their time"... looking at the text on the box at 1:57 full of "emojis" between words... that phrase fix perfectly

[@connclissmann6514]

KZbin said the video was nearly 9 minutes long but using compression, I was able to watch it in 4.5 minutes! 😉

[@Angellmbrr]

My favorite DAD-TUBE channel after Techmoan.

[@thrumilens6328]

DiskDoubler is a life saver back then 😅

[@haweater1555]

Just a few years ago I bought an external hard drive that was one third the price... and 100,000 times the capacity of the first one on the old price list.

[@Angelgreat]

Nowadays, we have BlueSCSI, SCSI2SD, and RaSCSI for classic Macs.

[@volvo09]

I like keeping hard drives as the main storage in classic computers. I grew up with them clicking and thinking away as programs opened and files were saved and it was part of the magic of computers.

[@whophd]

I reckon I’ve read that actual page of PC Magazine and the “Fact File”

[@arlandi]

I used a software called Zip Magic on my 486 with Windows. It automatically convert a .zip file into a directory and user can access the files inside it just like regular directories. to create a .zip file from a directory, you can just rename the directory by adding .zip in the directory name. very convenient and the created .zip files were compatible with regular zip files. I saved a lot of megabytes that way.

[@WingHonda]

Remind me my first laptop in hi school in 2003, a Sony Vaio .

[@JeremyBolanos]

It physically hurts to see old packaging that I used to see new.

[@motomike71]

I think Apple has had the patent on shipping their computers in standard configuration with anemic hard drive sizes since 1990.

[@RasVoja]

When 80MB HDD and 1MB RAM costed almost arm and leg

[@rajatanpacelana]

reminds me in the past of stacker.... that was used in PC,s.

[@The_Wandering_Nerd]

I always had enough disk space for my computers back then, until of course I got into collecting MP3s. And since those are already highly compressed, Disk Doubler could do nothing for them...

[@emberpoptartkittenz6040]

You should do a video on how the "'liberty engine project" by hidden technology' could be the future of electricity in your houses 🏠🏘️

[@theblubus]

@This Does Not Compute Awesome video content as always! Can you share the name of the song used at 5:25? I've been searching for it for years :(

[@kentwobits]

I remember using DoubleSpace with MS-DOS on a 386SX, which doubled my 20 megabyte hard drive to 40 megabytes

[@paherbst524]

I remember using something like this on dos. I can't remember what it was called though. But maybe double disk?

[@ronlevon4294]

I ones used in manually on PC with an ACE compression

[@volvo09]

Cool video! Neat piece of hardware to add to the classic collection. I only used disk compression once on a hand me down computer. After that drives of 1GB+ were common.

[@hyoenmadan]

Disk Compression software doesn't work very well past the 512MB barrier. Looks like bigger Compressed Volume Files (CVFs) make these utilities to crack. Testing in VM looks like the max them will go working reliably is something like 768MB disks, with a 512MB CVF as compressed drive.

[@acubley]

3:30 4 1/2 mice!!! It must be nice...

[@SlideRSB]

I remember the later versions of MS-DOS eventually added integrated disk doubling technology. I wonder if it included support for any kind of accelerator card similar to this one.

[@southernflatland]

I highly doubt there was any mass produced hardware card for DOS disk compression. The thing was that M$ introduced DoubleSpace disk compression in DOS 6.20, then they promptly got sued by Stac for stealing their disk compression technology. So they released DOS 6.21 which removed DoubleSpace altogether, leaving that version without any disk compression. Then later they released DOS 6.22 which introduced M$ own DriveSpace disk compression, which was apparently sufficiency different than Stac compression that apparently M$ had supposedly genuinely made their own solution, as they should have from the start. So anyways, between the lawsuit and the dual disk compression formats implemented in different versions of DOS, I'm pretty sure companies didn't have much interest in trying to dip their toes into those muddy waters to make any mass produced disk compression hardware accelerator for MS-DOS. But hey, who knows, there might be some sort of rare experimental prototype card out there..

[@IkarusKommt]

@@southernflatland You cannot steal an algorithm or a data format; those are not patentable in the civilized world.

[@southernflatland]

@@IkarusKommt Oh how incorrect you are. They definitely can and are patented. It depends on the exact wording of the patent. If it states something along the lines of 'in use on such and such hardware', then they've covered their asses enough to establish a legal patent. Believe me, I know, my father secured his own hardware patent and also went far enough to help research the technicalities of securing software patents. It's complicated yo.

[@soviut303]

You mention the high spec Mac IIci already getting decent compression performance, but I'm curious what kinds of performance you'd see putting this card in the lowest compatible spec. Would it still go just as fast? Was all the work offloaded on to the card or was the CPU still helping?

[@CDRiley]

Internet? Never heard it before? Is it fisherman friendly tool? 😂

[@MrLukealbanese]

Great video 😊😊

[@olepigeon]

I've been looking for one of these cards for ages. I only knew of one person on 68k MLA who actually had one. If you ever decide to sell yours, I would love to buy or trade for it for some other odd or weird Mac item.

[@SirKenchalot]

I designed a dsimilar system in software whereby the file would be saved with only the 1s and the 0s would be added in during decompression. Didn't work. What happened to the 'As always... thanks for watching...'?

[@GeomancerHT]

I crapped an old 486 with Microsoft Doublespace, I lost the first digital pictures of my sister all dressed up on a school show :(

[@snoopdoggthecertifiedg6777]

“Technicians hate him!”

[@Gerkozielman]

Nice video! Thans you.

[@RBSVader]

So it's literally a DPU. Some ideas are very old, indeed.

[@Foddley]

Can I implant this in my head and use it to increase my memory, so I can secretly smuggle data?

[@berner]

What are your thoughts on Double Space?

[@xr.spedtech]

When compression was in it's baby phase ... I was a baby myself.

[@jondonnelly4831]

Babies are compressed humans that take years to expand

[@KabelkowyJoe]

On PC there was no such thing because of Microsoft DoubleSpace first example of "mnopoly practices". Later on NTFS introduced same thing as most versatile system for both internal and USB drives. I will skip that atrocious ExFAT patent SCAM. NTFS works both for Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac features NTFS file compression witch is literally an LZSS on 4kB buffer "window". I wrote by myself accidentally such compressor 4096 = 12bit OFFSET, 4bit MARK, 16=4bit SIZE of pattern, plus 1,2,3,4byte RLE limited to 256 chars at once, very simmilar to what Microsoft embedded into Windows, saddly on mine Celeron 1GHz it was much slower, with hash chain it was around 4MB/s while somehow Windows was able to compress in 10-20MB/s almost as fast as LZ4, LZE... And so i surrendered abandoned, it was part of mine own "CopyHandler" to speed up Windows 98 copy process. For years what was implemented in Linux was garbage, and specially Haiku do have awful performance like kB/s. While on Windows i never noticed any slowdown in speed on USB 2.0 noticed some limitation in 1GBit network. Its not big deal but sometimes helps specially in era of SSD's. All Windows Update WIM files are compressed with almost same technique just not limited to 4096 bytes block. In addition as far im concerned they added Huffman coding for literals. These days hardware encrypter might be usefull if BitLocker, VeraCrypt wasnt on the market.. eventually good software beats any hardware accelerator..

[@SergeyVolkov]

I think we used Stacker for DOS way before microsoft implemented double space.

[@marsilies]

@@SergeyVolkov Yeah, DriveSpace/DoubleSpace was released as part of MS-DOS 6.0 in 1993. Stacker was released in 1990.

[@njwilksy]

Nice

[@thedd5021]

Epic

[@cheater00]

good luck recovering your data in case the file system takes a dump 🤣

[@wesley7753]

Cool

[@will_it_work]

Symantec....where software goes to die.

[@user-tb3ul1mf2g]

is it different to zip system?

[@IkarusKommt]

Yes, it was like LZO/LZ4.

[@user-tb3ul1mf2g]

@@IkarusKommt thanks bro

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Hot take: Mac Classic was a zillion times better looking than OSX.

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Esp those animations when minimising / unminimising windows.

[@lap456]

Datelining the file that's the worse thing that kind of app can do. Lets say I worked 20 hours on a 30min Star Wars Ewok cartoon for Disney and this deleted it. 20 hours of my life is gone and I just lost my job. That's why I don't like that. If you looked it up you will find that Zip, Rar, 7z and ISO files are just contenders of files no more no less.

[@Hex-Mas]

No relation to "dd"

[@Jkauppa]

like a gpu