Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing

guest · Nov 16, 2021

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all
Microsoft's Raymond Chen was tasked with digging into the issue
November 15, 2021
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/softram95/

One of the most consistently interesting and entertaining Microsoft blogs, Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, recently covered the dissection of a best-selling bit of software for Windows 95 – SoftRAM 95. There are few lessons about modern software in there as well.

What SoftRAM 95 claimed to do was software memory compression – on-the-fly compressing data in RAM so that your OS has more fast storage available than without the software. This crazy-sounding idea first appeared with Connectix's RAMdoubler in 1994, back when Mac OS 7.1 was current (although it worked on System 6, too)
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Back in the '90s, this was state-of-the-art stuff. Mark Russinovich, then of Winternals but now a Microsoftie himself, analysed SoftRAM 95, wrote a tool to test the functionality, and declared that it didn't work.
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Microsoft: The inside story of the outside investigation of SoftRAM 95

With the release of Windows 95 came quite a number of software products tailored to run on it. One of them that drew a lot of attention at the time was SoftRAM 95, a product whose box claimed it would “Double Your Memory”.

It turns out that it didn’t.
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There are many write-ups of what the software did (and notably didn’t do), but almost none of them dug deep into the code to explain what it was doing.
So I’m writing one.
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Rasheed187 · Nov 18, 2021

I think I remember this tool and back then it was already clear to me that most of the so called ''optimizers'' probably didn't work.

kC_ · Nov 18, 2021

the best optimizer of the time i remember was bonzi buddy! oh i wish there was a win 11 version of it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

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