Between this and RAMDOUBLER my PC was unstable unstoppable! ;-)
Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space.
Submitted 1 year ago by raduzaharia@lemmy.sdf.org to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
https://raduzaharia.medium.com/ms-dos-applications-drivespace-29ce0c0a1607
Comments
sramder@lemmy.world 1 year ago
dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 year ago
And then the Internet happened and we could freely download as much ram as we wanted to!
sj_zero 1 year ago
I remember there was one program that claimed it would update the microcode on your CPU to allow you to basically update your CPU for free to a newer type of processor, for example making your 486 operate like a pentium pro.
Entirely fake, but given the miracles of the time it seemed plausible.
piranhaphish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I used the proprietary predecessor, Stacker.
It was pretty magical. It turned my 40 MB hard drive into a (seemingly) 80 MB hard drive.
I don’t remember there being a significant performance penalty, because it was presumably overshadowed by the relatively (compared to processor speed) disk speeds.
Tathas@programming.dev 1 year ago
Both times I used either one of them, it crashed in the middle of compressing my hard drive and I had to reformat. But they worked fine the 2nd try!
sj_zero 1 year ago
"I don't remember a performance penalty, because everything was so slow it didn't matter"
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 year ago
These days, modern filesystem like ZFS has compression and data deduplication (identical data only stored once) support, as well as other useful features such as snapshots and copy-on-write.
TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This was the nerdiest “Choose your adventure” rpg but it was a fun read.
Sandra@idiomdrottning.org 1 year ago
We used a similar program for Windows 3.11, "doublestack" or something. It did work. It did make it a lot slower. We used it on one of the drives.th_in_gs@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.
There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: github.com/RJVB/afsctool
It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: …apple.com/…/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Btrfs has compression as well. It compressed my root partition to a third of it’s size. It helps out with some games as well, but they usually are not as compressible. The performance impact is pretty minimal as long as you don’t set the compression level excessively high.
rez_doggie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Laughs in PKUNZIP.EXE
Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Stacker, then MS ripped off Stacker and made Doublespace, got sued and changed the compression algorithm and renamed it DriveSpace.
Couldn’t use DoubleSpace or Stacker with Windows 3.X, there was no 32bit driver so disk access was horrendously slow. Windows95 was needed to use DriveSpace with full driver support, but it was still slow and by that time hard drives had caught up with the growing size of the OS and applications somewhat and live disk compression lost popularity, particularly with the way DriveSpace did it. Storing your entire drive as a single giant file backed by FAT32 was a terrible idea and prone to corruption.
When NTFS came around and introduced transparent file compression, that pretty much ended DriveSpace style compression. All modern FS now include some kind of compression, NTFS, APFS, BTRFS, ZFS. Even HFS+ had some ability to compress similar to APFS, but wasn’t very well known.
xmanmonk@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.
sj_zero 1 year ago
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they're famous for now.
LucyLastic@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Didn’t speed disk do an optimised defragment operation, putting OS files at the start of the drive etc
elxeno@lemm.ee 1 year ago
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
But look at that estimation screen! Again, rant all you wish, Microsoft knew how to handle a long running task even back in MS-DOS days. In this case, it’s estimated at 46 minutes. Great!
Meanwhile, today it’s “beachball!”. It’s become a bit of a lost art.
Die4Ever@programming.dev 1 year ago
on my old Windows 95 laptop I used the drive compression to create a partition to put some games on it, worked pretty well
sj_zero 1 year ago
This was a double edged sword. For a while I wanted to play with Windows 95, and my hard drive wasn't large enough. So what I did is I'd run drivespace on dos 6.22 which would double the size of the drive reported and let me install windows 95.
Big problem is that this is prior to journaling filesystems, and Windows 95 was buggy as hell. So windows 95 would crash, it would damage the File Allocation Table, the drivespace file would get corrupted, and you'd have to reinstall windows from scratch all over again.
Really frustrating era of computing, but on the other hand, something like drivespace made the impossible possible even if it was flawed, and many such technologies were coming out that were like that. Video game console emulation in the late 90s was another such thing that was like "What? This shouldn't be possible....should it?", as well as stuff like downloading video or audio, or even voice chat over a modem which is sort of insane when you think about it.
So a lot of stuff was frustrating and broken, but also miraculous and impressive. Really interesting time to be in love with computers as a hobby.
JoeHill@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Windows 3.1 came out in 1992. Yes you still were in DOS a lot back then, but it was hardly “way before windows”.
Speaking of just hunting for random stuff in DOS, my personal favorite “what’s this?” in DOS was Gorillas.bas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)?wprov…
DosDude@retrolemmy.com 1 year ago
I agree, but Windows 3.x was more a shell on top of MSDOS and had a more niche market, and windows 95 didn’t get most popular OS until late 1998. So for a lot of people that was way before windows. Also tech went a lot faster back then. Updates to an old system isn’t as important if it’s not connected to the world of online hackers.
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Windows 95 was also a shell on top of MSDOS. Windows NT wasn’t running on top of DOS, but it was primarily for business use until Windows XP.
KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I’m pretty sure I still have Gorillas on my HDD, carried with me from my families 286.
cryomancer20x6@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Discovering that game as a child is how I learned to code BASIC. I would change all kinds of values to make the game act crazy, colors, etc.
LucyLastic@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yeah, Gorillas was awesome … came with MSDos 6 IIRC