The (Outrageous) 90's Computer Scam That Didn't Double Your RAM | SoftRAM 95 | History in the Dark

[@MisguidedLogic]

In the 90’s 1MB of RAM was $100. Now, I just bought 64GB of RAM for $60. Times have changed so much!

[@UltimatePerfection]

Yeah, and considering the inflation, it turns out to be even cheaper.

[@soundspark]

Only $60? Was it some low end DDR4 with a ridiculously high CL number?

[@bloqk16]

When I saw this KZbin title, the thought of how pricey RAM was back in the 1990s also came to mind. When I was handling purchasing for an engineering company in the late 1990s, I recall some PCs with 16 MB of RAM with a price extension of $500 (US), which when adjusted for inflation, would over over $1K in 2024 dollars.

[@MisguidedLogic]

@@soundspark yes, but that’s not the point.

[@kaydog890]

"the 90s" is a 10 year window. Maybe the start of the 90s. My first PC had 32mb in 1995, and I certainly didn't spend 3200 USD on the entire PC, let alone the ram.

[@Hibachi-b2f]

This is like doubling your bank account by compressing your funds into Monopoly currency 🤣

[@zzoinks]

@@Hibachi-b2f it's like the crypto scam "if $1 value of this coin goes down, we will run a math machine to produce a different currency, thus stabilizing it back to $1." John Oliver covered it

[@MarcSherwood]

Are you offering this life-changing financial adivce for FREE here? This should at least require the commitment of a newsletter subscription to access! What is your position on McDonald's Monopoly stamps? I've been considering converting some of my Beanie Babies into the McDonalds Monopoly futures market, but am also looking at something more proven like a Timeshare, or some animal NFTs.

[@gabrielv.4358]

@@zzoinks basically free energy

[@joelankeny6277]

Came for the railroad content and stayed for the big business history and scam stories. Chapeau!

[@dustin_4501]

It is a classic story of people taking advantage of other people because they are new to that thing at that moment.

[@Exigentable]

This is quickly becoming a favorite channel of mine, great videos. Softram is such a wild tale. 80 bucks in 90's money too.

[@gstcomputing65]

I used Quarterdeck's MagnaRAM. It actually did what SoftRAM was supposed to, but it would never be better than actually adding real RAM to your system.

[@lornetyndale7974]

I also ran MagnaRam, I agree it did sort of work, it compressed the cache memory before writing it to the hard disk, and tried to keep frequently used cache memory in memory as opposed to being swapped. But I found it was a hit and miss. The memory compression ate up CPU cycles resulting in usually a slower running system then without MagnaRam. It was useless on Win95 and only somewhat helped with Win3.1. My solution was to install OS/2 Warp which actually worked a lot better then any version of Windows at the time.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@lornetyndale7974 As I mentioned in another thread, RAM compression is not worth the overhead in most cases. Swapping to slow disks (e.g. spinning-platter hard drives) or over a slow link (e.g. PATA, especially pre-DMA) is one sensible use-case; mobile devices (e.g. Android) are another.

[@lornetyndale7974]

@@alexhajnal107 for sure. The one use case where MagnaRam actually helped was on Win3.1 running PageMaker 5 when PageMaker was trying to render the page of a document. Something that MagnaRam kept in memory caused the render to go about 10% faster. Doing the same tests in WinOS/2 (running Windows 3.1 apps in OS/2) resulted in a similar speed up compared to just dos+win3.1 so I suspect that magnaram was just doing a little better memory management, similar to OS/2.

[@der.Schtefan]

​@@alexhajnal107nonsense. Modern oses use ram compression extensively. Mainly because the compression algorithms used are way simpler and faster, and cpu speed is much faster than even ssd disk io

[@FriedAudio]

I remember "Quarterdeck's EMM386". A Conventional Memory increase program. It actually worked.

[@JodyBruchon]

There is one legitimate "cleaning" function for the registry, but it's completely unrelated to "registry cleaners." ERUNT dumps registry hives into new hives which has the effect of "defragmenting" the hives by rebuilding them from scratch, thus eliminating all unused allocations and generally reducing fragmentation of longer extents. It's also unnecessary and dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and makes such a small difference on computers built in the past 15 years that I stopped doing it. On a single core VIA with XP? Yeah. Multi-core Windows 7 machine? Pointless.

[@Low760]

I remember defraging the HDD often

[@alexhajnal107]

Now if they'd just fix the many (⪆100) large (⪆1MB) files in a directory severe slow-down for NTFS. Was still present in Windows 10 IIRC. Makes NTFS unusable for many applications.

[@alexhajnal107]

Ditto for the severe slowdown when accessing remote CIFS directories that contain more than a handful of files.

[@JodyBruchon]

@alexhajnal107 It's amazing how hard it chokes on a folder with just a thousand files.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@JodyBruchon I've seen the CIFS issue for directories with well less than 100 files. Slowdown starts around 20 IIRC and snowballs from there. Edit: It appears like Windows is re-«stat»ing every file in a directory on every file access/stat [not sure what the Windows API equivalent of stat is]. Doesn't seem to be a CIFS server issue as non-Windows clients have no issues with the same directories. Regarding the NTFS slowdowns, I don't see similar issues on other platforms (e.g. ext4 under Linux) until one gets up to tens or hundreds of thousands of files in a single directory (even then access to individual named files is still fast).

[@SerpentNight]

"So then I formatted a 1.44Mb floppy to make a boot disk, copied over Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to it, dumped all the drivers I didn't need, restarted the machine and BAAMM!! I finally had enough memory to run 'DOOM'. Is that like crazy or what?" This will probably not get you laid.

[@alexhajnal107]

I dunno, DOS always seemed to be the kind of thing that people into S&M would enjoy.

[@Low760]

1.44mb. not 144.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@Low760 and MB, not Mb or mb. Though more accurately 1440 kiB (yes, they mixed powers;1474560 B [unformatted] = 1.44 × 1000 × 1024 B).

[@annenelson5656]

@@alexhajnal107 MS Dos was one thing but if you’re old enough to remember CPM/Dos then you know a whole other level of torture. 🤣😂

[@alexhajnal107]

@@annenelson5656 Never used CP/M though apparently Atari's TOS for the ST was loosely based on it (edit: just the system calls, not e,g, a CLI). DOS seemed like a hellscape both from a user and developer standpoint. Personally, I used [sane!] 68000-based systems until switching over to Linux.

[@crimester]

this is like doubling your ram by not doubling your ram and instead lying you did until there are consequences

[@Sheikh_Speare]

For a moment I thought this was a Michael MJD video because of the Thumbnail lol.

[@Sheikh_Speare]

​@@gooseman58 I just checked, it's not. Still, gave off MJD vibes lol.

[@Sonic_the_hedgedog]

​​@gooseman58 No, it's not the same thumbnail. It is "similar" because they are talking about the same topic and there is a photo of SoftRAM in the thumbnail... (It is not the same photo though)

[@der.Schtefan]

Fun fact: modern operating systems actually do what SOFTRAM was supposed to do. Before swapping out a page to disk in a low memory condition, they apply a very fast compression / decompression algorithm, which will be way faster than a DISK operation. They will even do it before a memory low condition to preferably clear up memory for disk cache space. Just look at a modern process explorer from Windows 10/11 or MacOs and Look at "compressed memory"

[@alexhajnal107]

The (optional) equivalents on Linux are the zswap and related zram subsystems. The former is just for swap compression while the latter creates a compressed block device in RAM (optionally disk-backed) that can be used for any purpose, swap, a filesystem, etc.

[@DamianWard96]

Man oh man, I could listen to the windows 95 startup sounds for hours on end

[@SerpentNight]

XP was pretty good for the most part but its log in jingle was nothing against 95.

[@jdslyman1720]

How about 2000? Compared to anything since, it's very elegant.

[@DamianWard96]

@@jdslyman1720 I don't hate it! It reminds me of the star spangled banner "and the rocket's red glare!"

[@alexhajnal107]

@@jdslyman1720 2000 was arguably the best OS they ever made (with 7 being a close contender).

[@BradW-ye8cn]

​@@alexhajnal107the 98se was my fav

[@lusitaniafilms]

I remember that software. After looking at the price they were charging for it, I thought that it would be cheaper for me to get more rame. and back in those days they Ram chips came on a tube lol

[@7cassandraecw378]

Happy holidays, and thanks as always for the info 🧡

[@johnps1670]

It's like Apple memory, 8 = 16.

[@gabrielv.4358]

lmao the worlds worst scam ever made, compressing ram into the ssd causing it to fail 450% faster

[@magickmarck]

This was in (nearly) every software shop back in the day I recognize the box!

[@DaBren20]

Holy shit I remember you from the early days of youtube. I watched your videos back in 2008. Nice to see you back on youtube

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

On the other hand, QEMM 97 was awesome. It was great at shuffling resources around and freeing up RAM. I used it constantly back in those days to much success.

[@bloqk16]

I loved seeing the screen images of those eras from Windows 3.1 and 95; especially so the icons Windows had back then.

[@Bsan_the_viddiot]

Very passionate in explaining. Good stuff.

[@Trainfan1055Janathan]

What?! CCleaner doesn't work?!

[@onceagain77]

Linux uses something similar to this called swap parition but it actually works. Now that we have gigabytes of ram it's not really necessary unless you want to use hibernate. Some distros use a swap file instead of a partition.

[@alexhajnal107]

On Linux (and likely other OSes) swap can be useful even when one has RAM to spare. The reason is that the OS will use any free memory for caching recently read files, directory listings, and the like. This dramatically improves performance for many tasks. By enabling swap even if one technically doesn't need it the OS can swap out unused portions of running programs thus making more memory available for cache.

[@deathbydeviceable]

I was cured of cancer after saving $2.95 on my car insurance

[@jediknightdiscomike22]

Damn !!! I had to pay $3.95 for car insurance to cure my cancer ! Where do I get the deal you got ???

[@zzco]

Ahh, good ol' SoftRAM- venerable snake-oil software from the '90s.

[@Mannard74]

People did the same thing with hard drive capacity using programs like DoubleSpace and Stacker. Let's see a PC run stock vs. loaded with Softram and Stacker. Bet it runs noticeably slower.

[@jediknightdiscomike22]

I remember those as well !!! Thanks for the memory !!!

[@microchipmatt]

I remember, “Ram Doubler”

[@ReganSmash33]

Don’t know if you’re looking for suggestions on future videos. But, Miniscribe is also a good candidate for a future video

[@anzaca1]

The origin of the term "bricking your hard drive".

[@matthewbanta3240]

There were hard drive doubling programs back then that did actually work by compressing your files automatically. Microsoft even included a program called DriveSpace to do just this in later versions of Dos. Ram was extremely expensive. So back then, your ram would often to get used up which would force windows to use your hard drive instead. Hard drives are significantly slower than ram. So if this product did actually work, then there would have been use cases where getting more ram at the expensive of some speed would have been extremely useful.

[@nipponhakkyou]

Can’t believe RealPlayer was *that* hated.

[@alexhajnal107]

I loved it myself. It was the only way that video was practical over dial-up.

[@mcuserton]

I yelled at my phone "Real Player was revolutionary!" Lol. IDK that it was, but it sure felt like it to me at the time.

[@5argetech56]

Soft Ram was a Soft-Scam! I remember back in the day I had 16 megabytes of real ram in my PC, and I had bragging rights!

[@Akira625]

My PC at the time came with 8 MB, and I had to spend $200 to get 16 MB more.

[@bloqk16]

@@Akira625 It certainly boggles the mind that nowadays a low-end USB flash drive with several GBs of memory can be had for pocket change.

[@gabrielv.4358]

its insane to think that a calculator has more than that

[@jediknightdiscomike22]

I remember this product. The title and its advertisement was gimicky and I would always pass it by on the store shelves. I never purchased it myself.

[@johncmitchell4941]

I'm here to confess that I watch a few of Darkness' videos that aren't about trains. But they keep getting better regardless of topic so yeah 10/10 on this one too.

[@jayward8237]

Another amazing video!

[@cypriandraku]

Who remembers Rambooster? Amazing little software that would purche ram.... Or so it seemed

[@JenniferinIllinois]

Ah the Windows 95 days when companies were coming out with all kinds of useless programs for the computer newbs.

[@damascus6478]

And the ad right before this video was for a dongle that claims you can get all pay channels for free. We haven't advanced at all.

[@UltimatePerfection]

You can. It's called IPTV. It's illegal, but it works.

[@gabrielv.4358]

What are ads? i dont see them in ages

[@thewatchman13]

I enjoy your channel. I have some suggestions for videos if you don’t mind. Sports Authority, Quiznos, Bigs Lots/Party City (considering the recent news).

[@jediknightdiscomike22]

Back in the days of when I started building computers and they were becoming popular, I remember seeing pre-built computers in stores with advertisements that it comes with all these programs "for free". Anyone who knew computers at that time knew that when you looked at the hardware specifications - you realized that these were underpowered or underperforming PCs being charged at prices for adequate powered computers minus the software. The programs they offered were nothing special - it was like the computers were bundled with freeware that you could download from a BBS. Alot of bloatware that you would never use, but people did not realize it at the time until they purchased the computer and started using it at home. I remember that my GF at the time purchased one of these computers with all these programs on it and got a really good deal for it. I had no comment for it. You would have been better off spending the same amount of money (or maybe $100-$200 more) for a more powerful computer and purchase the better software separately, and been more happier with your computer.

[@jediknightdiscomike22]

I remember disk doubler where it would double the size of your disk space.... by compressing the files. DOS would actually have a utility to do this starting in DOS 4 i believe.

[@annenelson5656]

I hate Windows. I was stuck with it at work but at home I was all Mac. Then when I had my own business I used Mac until the company that ran my tax prep/accounting software decided to not continue to support Mac I just retired.

[@zepheris_]

I remember the ads for that software

[@anzaca1]

2:42 A good analogy would be a revolver. The bullets loaded in the cylinder are "in memory", and the spare bullets in your pocket are "on disk".

[@alexhajnal107]

A better analogy might be a library with reference books on the public stacks (RAM) or available by request at the reference desk (swap). Popular books get kept on/moved to the public stacks, ones that wane in popularity get moved to the on-request stacks.

[@Sevenfeet0]

Before SoftRAM, there was a program on MacOScalled RamDoubler that did the same thing except it actually did use a compression scheme to “increase RAM”. And MacOS has a similar scheme baked into the OS since MacOS X and I suspect other OSes do this now too.

[@John-bi1lv]

I so do not miss computing in the 90s at all. We have come a long way since

[@alexhajnal107]

The '90s were a pretty exciting time IMO. Tech was changing so fast yet there was still a large diversity of platforms. The future looked pretty bright and the present was exciting. Went from non-Internet dial-up on a 68000 desktop to always-on high-speed Internet access (I even had 5 static IPs!) in the space of a decade. Then there's the emergence of PDAs and the like (the 8MB Handspring Visor Deluxe being the best hand-held device ever made IMO).

[@John-bi1lv]

@alexhajnal107 that is exactly why I don't miss it as a user. Platforms are much more stable now and easier to use.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@John-bi1lv I disagree. Software is getting very bloated with multiple layers of abstraction. Back in the day efficiency was key and programs ran as close to the bare metal as possible. Now there's API upon API, not to mention stuff like Flatpack, Snap, etc. that throw all pretense of efficiency out the window (or of integrating with the rest of the system for that matter, but that's a separate issue). With my last OS "upgrade" my boot time went from

[@John-bi1lv]

@alexhajnal107 we can definitely respectfully disagree so I get that so that's cool. I think we're just coming at it from different perspectives. I look at it from a user perspective and getting things done. The software is just now a lot better.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@John-bi1lv Fair enough. I'm of the view that if improvements in RAM and CPU let you do things that were infeasible before then that's great. However if one is just squandering those resources through poor programming then I think it's a waste. (There's a reason any CS program worth its salt has Computer Architecture and Assembly Language Programming as required classes; it's not because most programmers will be working in assembler but rather that it's really important to understand what's going on under the hood.)

[@Rachel_M_]

This reminds me of the phone apps that claimed to increase battery capacity a few years ago.

[@GreenAppelPie]

You are absolutely wrong of CCleaner

[@bloqk16]

And to think that back in the 1990s, notifying the customers that got scammed had to be done by the US Mail, as emailing back then was not in widespread use as it was just several years later.

[@alexhajnal107]

You did send in your registration card, right?

[@bloqk16]

@@alexhajnal107 🤣

[@kylepotter1387]

Is CC Cleaner ok?

[@wadmodderschalton5763]

Now for Bonzi Software especially Bonzi Buddy to be featured.

[@alexhajnal107]

I could have sworn he already did a video on them.

[@Charles-i1s7x]

Thank you so much for this amazing video! I need some advice: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?

[@vanillajombi]

Realplayer was pretty good for videos (*wink wink*) back in the hpb days

[@alexhajnal107]

Obligatory XKCD reference: 598

[@TheEDFLegacy]

Interesting! This is reminding me of the old download accelerators from back then. Were they also placeboware? Or did they actually make a difference?

[@alexhajnal107]

Often they were malware. In some instances they may also have made downloads faster (by compressing the transmitted data) and more reliable (by allowing partially-completed downloads to be resumed if the connection was broken). Related were xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, and kermit. These were specifically for transferring files over a raw serial connection (e.g. to/from a dial-up BBS). They applied various data encoding and compression schemes to improve throughput and reliability over the modem link. Some also allowed things like transmitting the filename and batching multiple files into a single transfer (IIRC).

[@TheEDFLegacy]

@@alexhajnal107 Interesting! 😮

[@alexhajnal107]

@@TheEDFLegacy Something else download managers could do is queue a set of links for batch download. That way one could e.g. select a bunch of URLs and let the download run (sequentially) overnight. Handy in the days before high-speed Internet. I never used one of the third-party ones but did on occasion use the one built in to my desktop environment.

[@Meshamu]

@@alexhajnal107 The resume feature of download managers was great! Sometimes I needed to download a humongous file, and couldn't just let my computer monopolize the phone line continuously for days.

[@CassiusZedaker-pr7kc]

This was actually released for Macintosh first, then "ported" to PC.

[@the_kombinator]

I love the fact that I was introduced to x86 at this time at the age of 11 - the explosion of growth, a 386 by my side (Don't look too deeply into it, it was a 386 SX 20 with 1 Mb RAM, and it was a Compaq Deskpro, good luck allowance moneying any upgrades there) in... lol... 1994, when most people had high end 486s and maybe even Pentiums.

[@alexhajnal107]

5:28 thread = a group of instructions running within a single program; kind of like a mini-program. A single program can have multiple threads running side-by-side. For example, one might handle graphics, another might handle network communication, another might do time-consuming maths, and another might handle user input. Threads will communicate with one-another when they need to; outside of that they usually run independently of one-another. Edit: Related is multi-processing. Conceptually this is very similar to multi-threading but splits tasks up into multiple independently-running programs rather than multiple tasks running within a single program. This is typically only done on Unix systems as creating a new program (specifically creating a copy of the current program) is very fast on those OSes. On Windows, however, starting a new program is very time-consuming; in addition, the OS doesn't support creating a clone of the current program as Unix does (the *fork* system call). Both multi-threading and multi-processing can (in theory) run a program's tasks in parallel on multiple CPUs though often this is not supported for multi-threading.

[@Mrpurple75]

Virtual RAM

[@phill6859]

Android includes this functionality, because it does actually help

[@threestans9096]

I found Superfetch to work well in certain situations. Esp if your hard drive was arranged properly-OS in the right part of the disk, RAID or similar set up, etc

[@bondjovi4595]

Still made changes to the .bat file. It wasn't a scam. It was a computer repair man on a floppy disk.

[@alexhajnal107]

Paging = Writing data in main memory (RAM) to the hard disk OR Reading data back into RAM from disk. Page = Block of main memory that can be copied to disk (typically 4kB). Paging to disk allows a larger RAM size to be emulated by writing infrequently-used pages to disk; the RAM previously used by them can then be then be used for other purposes. When needed they are read back in to RAM. The way this works is that the computer's CPU can work with either real addresses (fixed locations in physical RAM) or virtual addresses (which look like real addresses to programs but that actually reside in an arbitrary location in RAM or on disk [precisely where is known only to the CPU and OS]). The OS is responsible for moving pages between RAM and disk as needed, and with telling the CPU which (virtual) pages are currently stored at each RAM address (the current mapping is stored at a known location in physical RAM). If the CPU needs to access a page that is not physically in RAM it will notify the OS which will then fetch the appropriate page from disk. Programs always use virtual addresses; only the OS concerns itself with real RAM addresses.

[@bahamlabs1]

Love the video, but as a computer scientist, I disagree with the registry clearing comment. I get systems in the shop all the time that NEED this because of some, often very specific, issue we're trying to repair.

[@FusionDeveloper]

"Honey" is one of the worst companies of all time.

[@bigrod359]

Softram was ahead of its time

[@gabrielv.4358]

Even today people still think they can double the ram by using the pagefile (That gets atrocious usage in windows 10, over 30gb)

[@kylebarton6498]

They did however have some pretty sweet images they used for their disc and box lol if I stole it for an album cover do you think they could sue? It looks like a dead grasshopper or something looking through a infrared imager thing..

[@chaoticsystem2211]

meanwhile on linux: zram

[@alexhajnal107]

and zswap

[@UltimatePerfection]

Download more RAM

[@veryannoying7257]

Double your sub count Darkness

[@enriquereacts88]

What about Hurricane98?

[@alexhajnal107]

Eh? Do tell.

[@Derpy1969]

I’m surprised scummy products like this don’t exist today. Or do they.

[@295g295]

Tell about dividing my hard-drive into multiple sectors. Was that a good thing to do in the 1990s, but not ever done now?

[@alexhajnal107]

A sector is the smallest quantum of information that can be addressed on a drive. Historically this was 512 bytes but many (very large) modern drives have moved to 4096 byte sectors. Spinning-platter drives (hard drives, floppy disks, etc.) use one or more iron-oxide coated platters as their physical media. Each platter had one or two read/write *_heads_* with the surfaces being divided into concentric circular *_cylinders._* Each cylinder on each surface, referred to a *_track,_* is then further subdivided into *_sectors,_* a.k.a. *_blocks_* containing a (virtually-always fixed) number of bits (stored as magnetic fields). The smallest addressable unit is one *_sector._* Even if one only wants to read or write a single bit then the entire sector that it's in has to be read/(re)written. One may encounter the term CHS addressing (for Cylinder/Head/Sector) when discussing older drives. The above is what this is referring to. (Modern drives use linear block addressing, [LBA] i.e. each sector has a unique [single] index number, rather than the old 3-part CHS addresses.) Hope that made some sense.

[@alexhajnal107]

TLDR: All drives use sectors (a,k.a. blocks) with a typical block size of 512 bytes (historical) or 4096 bytes (newer. very large disks). One sector is the smallest-sized set of data that can be read/written at one time.

[@Viss_Valdyr]

yeah, those were fake. But now you can just get an USB stick for doing the same thing. My PC runs double as fast, and it has a pleasing LED light as well. It was only 100€!

[@bigmclargehuge8219]

100000% don't download registry cleaners, don't be lazy, get a sponge and some gentle dish soap and clean the registry yourself, it'll give you a sense of pride and accomplishment. 😊

[@keithsweetfeld2663]

It's a good thing I didn't have a PC until 2006. 😂😂

[@alexhajnal107]

I got a call from telemarketer back in the '90s. They asked if I had a computer. Me being a total geek and also working in the field said "several". They asked what OS I used and I replied mostly Linux but I do have an NT 4 system for work purposes. They ended the call rather quickly after that!

[@beanman853]

technically bar compression you can reallocate disk space to the ram section (this works in linux only)

[@alexhajnal107]

??? What are you referring to?

[@alexhajnal107]

Are you referring to RAM disks? Modern Linux systems typically place /tmp in a dynamically-sized RAM disk.

[@beanman853]

@@alexhajnal107 you can alter the order by which your computer uses the disks so that it uses your disk drive the same as it would ram

[@alexhajnal107]

@beanman853 Can you be more specific? Which subsystem are you referring to? Are you perhaps referring to the priorities that can be assigned to the various swap files and/or partitions on a given system? (i.e. using swapon -p PRIORITY /path/to/swap)

[@mallardtheduck1]

Of course, modern versions of Windows have RAM compression built in... So the concept isn't bad, just a scammy product.

[@Astinsan]

windows nt kernel does have memory compression. To this day.

[@chincemagnet]

If we used a gen 5 NVMe SSD as ram for an old Win 95 pc, it would perform better than the actual ram 😂

[@judewestburner]

It did exactly what it was supposed to do, take your money and give it to them

[@ramons8908]

I remember "Realplayer" and it was really that bad. The only function of Realplayer was to crash the computer that was trying to run it. The big hack on win95 and win95 was to disable the virtual memory. Old hard drives use to slow computers down to a crawl. Most "utilities" that you payed for were scammy. There were an entire list of things that dumb things dumb people did to their computers, but boy did you lean quick sorting out all those mistakes, plus the ones made by the people you brought the computer from and the ones made by Microsoft themselves.

[@alexhajnal107]

FWIW, the Linux version of Realplayer was rock solid. I recall zero instances of it crashing, never mind bringing the OS down with it.

[@qvcybe]

didn't windows just add a thing like this to use with external drives? (later i mean)

[@robertpatterson61]

I actually liked real player back in the day

[@NinjaArmy36]

On top of ram compression there are also softwares like ramdisk which allocates parts of or all of a drive to increase ram. It has been around for quite a while and has had mixed results

[@tomrow32]

@@NinjaArmy36 That is not how a RAM disk program is used. RAM disk instead allocates RAM for use as a temporary file storage drive. A RAM disk is incredibly fast but since it is RAM it is erased when the power is turned off.

[@NinjaArmy36]

@tomrow32 ah yes you're correct. Got my names mixed up. I've used both in the past. It's just been a while. When SSDs were first coming to market I remember while obviously not as fast as ram obviously, they were fast enough to supliment software that needed large amounts of ram.

[@erie910]

A "ramdisk" is a hard drive produced by software out of actual memory. As soon as the computer was shut down or restarted, the ram disk disappears. Of course, the ram disk could have been produced with the appropriate instruction in the Autoexec.bat file.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@NinjaArmy36 Word of warning with SSDs: Don't put your paging file on them; it will (likely) dramatically reduce the drive's lifespan. (SSDs can only be written to a relatively small number of times before they fail. For regular files this isn't an issue but for things like paging/swap that number can be reached in a matter of months.) I know doing so is commonplace nowadays but it's still something that I'd avoid.

[@NinjaArmy36]

@alexhajnal107 haha yeah i can see the problem there 😂😂😂

[@Matt2010]

All it really is, is VM or Swap. Now for Macs at this era PowerPC mac with Mac os 7 8 even 9, could use RAMDoubler it was called but this worked no differently from VM/Swap, the only difference it was better implemented then the internal way of the VM in the OS itself.

[@intel386DX]

You don not even show on the video syarting the porgram , but random activities. Bary bad .

[@andrewbowen4544]

90s where everyone could a PC. Where before it was the flight rich this at get one

[@alexhajnal107]

Think I words work some grammar.

[@xRussianbishop]

Hey That Prince is going to make me rich when he gets back to me. You just See

[@michaelhoskins832]

Looking back on this from 2024.. as I sit here with 96 GB of DDR4 in my PC.

[@alexhajnal107]

I'm loving the copious RAM that's available now. Yea, a lot of it is squandered on bloated applications, however there are a lot of algorithms that can be used now that were never feasible in the past because they are completely-reliant on having very large sets of data in RAM.

[@bobbysenterprises3220]

And now windows does this by default

[@magnemoe1]

It does? It makes little sense, perhaps for disc cache level stuff but you has to unpack before you can read as the compressed file is more like an ram drive than ram.

[@bobbysenterprises3220]

@magnemoe1 if you have extra memory and your CPU is running at a high percentage turning it off can use the memory and lessen CPU load.

[@alexhajnal107]

@@magnemoe1 The overhead is why Unix systems (bar Android) typically don't do RAM compression. There's an argument to be made for compressing swap though, especially when swapping to a low-bandwidth device like a [spinning rust] hard-drive or over a low-bandwidth link (e.g. PATA).

[@sresnic]

FWIW, it’s pronounced PLETHora, not pleTHOra.

[@alexhajnal107]

The latter pronunciation is also correct, albeit rather uncommon.

[@thedude15-sm2zu]

You’re pronouncing the name of the company incorrectly. It’s pronounced the same way as the word “synchronous.”

[@ramboti6402]

By registry cleaners I hope you don't mean windows debloaters? Are you a microsoft bootlicker, because they heap malware and adware into the OS.

[@DonaldRoss-k7j]

Remember "Quarterdeck?" I stole a pallet of those from United Airline warehouse in Boise Idaho and resold them to a computer store in Nampa Idaho in the mid 90s.

[@aaronhersey8466]

Really, who buys software to double their RAM when you can just download more RAM off the web 😂

[@alexhajnal107]

SoEAAS? (Swap over Ethernet As A Service)

[@MrWeedWacky]

"doesn't RAM use hardware" no, RAM IS hardware.

[@alexhajnal107]

Memories of seeing planes of magnetic core memory in the mainframe at my dad's office. You could see where each individual bit was stored!