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 the “System Memory” that could auto-expand and made applications think they had contiguous memory. I don’t know if the “compression” was a scam but the better memory management definitely wasn’t.

Also for PPC Macs, it was usually bundled with “Speed Doubler” - a much faster 68K emulator than what came with early PPC Macs. The operating system itself was also partially emulated, you did get real world speed improvements.

RAM definitely wasn’t cheap in 1994, I paid $500 for 16MB of extra RAM for my PPC 6100/60 for a total of 24MB (third party reseller). I remember in 1996 though buying a 32MB RAM stick for around $350 for the DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my 6100/60.

It's amazing how fast capacity and pricing changed back then, and it still happens today.

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...

Onion?!

AFAIK, "I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time" is a Simpsons reference.

They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

Gimme five bees for a quarter!

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

It may have been a separate product in the beginning, but in the version that's on my PowerBook (and the version I had as a kid) it was built-in to Speed Doubler (which was still a separate product from RAM Doubler) https://i.imgur.com/XBw9fz3.jpg

I had a PC so this was the windows 95 version

"you had to manually tell it how much memory an application could use"

So it was the cloud, essentially.

You mean "8MB". :D I was a poor high school kid so that would have killed my lunch budget for at least a month.