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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me -

Back in the MS-DOS days, when the RAM was sparse, there was a class of so-called "memory optimization" programs. They all inevitably found at least few KB to be reclaimed through their magic even if the same optimizer was run back to back with itself and allowed to "optimize" things. That is, on each run they always find extra memory to be freed. They ultimately did nothing but claim they did the work. Must've sold pretty well nonetheless.

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>Back in the MS-DOS days, when the RAM was sparse, there was a class of so-called "memory optimization" programs

You may find this interesting: Investigations into SoftRAM 95 by Raymond Chen [1] and Mark Russinovich [2] respectively.

"They implemented only one compression algorithm.

It was memcpy."

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...

[2] https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/inside-softram-95/184409937

I remember using MemTurbo in the Windows 2000 era, though now I know it was mostly smoke and mirrors. My biggest gripe these days is too many "hardware accelerated" apps eating away VRAM, which is less of a problem with Windows (better over-commit) but which causes me a few crashes a month on KDE.

> Back in the MS-DOS days, when the RAM was sparse, there was a class of so-called "memory optimization" programs. They ultimately did nothing but claim they did the work. Must've sold pretty well nonetheless.

QEMM worked by remapping stuff into extended memory - in a time that most software wasn't interested in using it. It worked as advertised.

Quarterdeck made good stuff all around. Desq and DesqView/X were amazing multitaskers. Way snappier than Windows and ran on little to nothing.

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