There are many tools that modern IT service providers use to give businesses and organisations an advantage when it comes to their computer needs, but one of the most unheralded is their wealth of expertise.
Business computers put a lot of effort into making life easier for users, and a rather infamous piece of software managed to, in its own infamous way, contribute to the principles of IT as we know them today.
In 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95, which became a massive game changer for businesses by making computers feel less complex and intimidating to use. Its relative simplicity essentially invented IT as we know it today.
The problem was that it was quite expensive to upgrade to it, not only because of the price of the operating system itself but also because it often required a hardware upgrade, which at the time could cost hundreds, if not thousands of pounds per machine.
This led to a strange cottage industry of “software upgrades” that claimed to increase a system’s specifications without buying additional computer parts.
By far the most infamous of these was SoftRAM95, sold by Synchronis Softcorp the same month that Windows 95 was sold at retail.
The biggest hurdle for a lot of computer users and early IT teams at the time was RAM requirements, which were four times higher than the then-standard Windows 3.1 at least, but closer to eight times.
At the time, the recommended 8MB of RAM could cost up to £250, a cost that adds up prohibitively if it needed to be applied to dozens or even hundreds of computers.
By contrast, you can buy 16 times the recommended RAM to run Windows 11 for less than half that price.
SoftRAM95 cost just £60 by contrast and claimed to potentially double the available RAM to Windows 95 through clever memory compression. This turned out to be a lie.
What it consisted of was a memory management driver, and a piece of software that used a single compression algorithm that only helped a small number of users, as well as increased the size of Windows’ virtual memory page file, something a typical user could do for free with the help of someone knowledgeable in IT.
The company declared bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising, but it helped raise greater awareness of how a computer actually works.
