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oleorun@real.lemmy.fan to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish · 2 months ago

The great RAM doubler hoax of the 90s: How SoftRAM scammed over 650,000 PC users

www.xda-developers.com

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The great RAM doubler hoax of the 90s: How SoftRAM scammed over 650,000 PC users

www.xda-developers.com

oleorun@real.lemmy.fan to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish · 2 months ago
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SoftRAM promised to double your RAM, but became one of the biggest tech scams of the 90s. Here’s how Syncronys fooled hundreds of thousands of user
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  • MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dk
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    2 months ago

    RAM Doubler for Mac actually did work as advertised though and this has probably been a contributing factor to the number of people falling for the scam.

    • General_Shenanigans@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yes, I do remember this RAM compression software. It was like magic. When my mom installed it on our Mac I didn’t believe her at first until I hopped on and used the computer.

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Good. As soon as I read the title, I thought of RAM Doubler and wondered if young me was a sucker for buying it!

    • p1mrx@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      zram also works on modern Linux systems.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      deleted by creator

  • Troy@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Remember the free cupholder exe that opened your CD ROM drive? ;)

    • oleorun@real.lemmy.fanOP
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      2 months ago

      That reminded me of one of my all-time favorite Daily WTF articles:

      https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT

  • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol
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    2 months ago

    What a throwback! It’s amazing that we can now simply download more ram.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Came into the thread just looking for that and was not disappointed!

  • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    Now that is a name I haven’t heard in a long time…

  • Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

  • The Real King Gordon@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I remember this. Everyone was installing it. “Now I have 8 gigs of ram!” Weeee

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      *MB

      • The Real King Gordon@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        O yeah. How quickly I fogor. 16 whole megs of ram? I’ll never need that much!

        • Willy@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          Yeah it was crazy how much it grew for a while and then about 15 years ago it stopped at 32gigs and still seems stuck there

  • miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    Remember ‘Stacker’?
    Could triple the size of your hard drive.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      There was DoubleSpace, which compressed your files in DOS so you could allocate more memory to programs that needed it. It’s interesting that when trying to run old games on modern hardware sometimes there isn’t enough conventional memory because computing shifted into RAM based systems.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace?useskin=vector

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    A measly $10 rebate?!? How about a full refund?

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