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Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space. (raduzaharia.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.