31–40 of 64 posts
I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
RAM Doubler for the Mac wasn’t a scam. Because of the piss poor way that Classic MacOS handled memory where you had to manually tell it how much memory an application could use and applications needed that much contiguous memory, you could easily find yourself with plenty of RAM but it being fragmented and unusable. Also, you needed to have as much disk space as you had RAM + any “virtual memory”. RAM Doubler used th…
I remember my first PC clone in 1992 it was a white box with a 40MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM, within 6 months or so I spent $200 on two more 1MB 70ns SIMMs.
Our high school had a small lab running Mac IIci's with 8MB of RAM and those things were probably $8K each with display, it was a big deal to get time on them. We had more physical space than money, so we had an IBM PS/1 lab, a couple of ][e labs, and my personal favorite was a networked TRS-80 Model 3 lab where the master machine had a 10MB hard disk. Those things were beasts -- we used to play some sort of a networked crossword puzzle game while wearing an onion tied to our belts (which was the style at the time). Give me 3 B's for a quarter you'd say...
I thought I was the first to file a class action lawsuit against the makers of this in December 1995, but now I see someone else filed about a month earlier. The "driver" files were just renamed Windows files. I was 16 years old, so my dads name was used. I had provided the technical proof behind the claim, so I even got part of the attorney's fees. (Marotto v Syncronys Softcorp) https://sec.report/Document/000095014…
Wikipedia describes a bit of this saga [1], and the conclusion was that they were ordered to settle with the FTC and issue rebates and then: Syncronys eventually filed for bankruptcy in July 1998 after releasing other poorly received tools. A large number of its creditors were customers who had not received their rebates for SoftRAM. I wonder what the story was from the company perspective? Sounds like it just was a…
It was supposedly the other way around. The programmer claimed he had in fact implemented it, and management claims they really thought they were shipping a real, working product.
I worked at a company that was also in the "utilities to improve system performance" niche. In 1997, we were showing our new program at Comdex. It was a finalist for a "Best Utility" Best of Comdex award from Byte, and Jerry Pournelle wrote a very positive review, and said it had his vote for Best Utility.
We were looking for a distributor for it, and a couple companies were interested. One was Syncronys. They could get it into a lot more stores, and promote it more effectively, than the others but we were concerned about trusting them after reading the revelations about SoftRAM.
We asked them to explain how the SoftRAM thing happened and were told about the programmer faking it. We would have been pretty skeptical of that explanation--it is almost always management that fakes things--except it turned out we knew that programmer (or rather, our founder knew him personally, and some of the rest of us knew of him) and it was quite believable that he was behind this.
Our company was our founder's second company. Let's call him F. His first had been a Mac utility company founded in 1984, founded with a partner (P) he had met when he took a couple years off from school to go work in Silicon Valley. When they started the company, F came back to Pasadena and hired a bunch of his Caltech friends and acquaintances on contract to get their first product out over the summer with him as chief engineer, and P stayed in SV to handle the business end of things while F stayed in Pasadena to code and run engineering.
P did not run the business honestly, and both F and those friends and acquaintances F hired ended up getting stiffed out of a significant fraction of what they were owed when the company fell apart and P disappeared with what money they did have.
As you've probably guessed by now, P ended up at Syncronys, where he was in charge of engineering and was the developer of SoftRAM.
By the time Syncronys was wanting to make a deal to distribute our software, they had gotten rid of P, and were just going to be a distributor of software developed by others.
We did end up, after much debate, going with Syncronys. They had more reach than the other distributor we were considering, and offered a better deal (probably because they needed something decent to help fix their reputation). (I don't remember if I agreed with this, or argued for going with the other distributor).
Things ended up working out OK going with Syncronys. There were some people apprehensive about buying something from them, but the reviews were good, and made it clear the product was real, and that it was not developed by Syncronys--they were just distributing a new product from another, established Windows utility company that had a good track record. As far as we could tell, that was enough to overcome most people's apprehension.
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$2,000 from Syncronys and $2,000 from the attorneys fees (which totaled $35,000). That got me my first car, and a lesson... The attorneys always win.
I'm hoping that you're actually an attorney now!
This entrepreneurial spirit lives on nowadays at https://www.downloadmoreram.com/
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Speed Doubler also added multi-threaded copying to the Finder long before Apple did. Without Speed Doubler you couldn’t copy a file and do anything else at the same time (aside from switch to already-running background applications). Just that was worth the price of admission
That was the third product in the bundle - Copy Doubler
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I'm hoping that you're actually an attorney now!
I know several attorneys, and man, I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
