It's even older than 02007! You could put your filesystem on a ramdisk in CP/M in 01979 if you bought a third-party utility, though this needed bank-switched RAM to be really useful in CP/M: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Disk_System
Dataram used to sell RAMdisks ("BULK CORE") for PDP-11s starting in 01976, but those were hardware devices, so maybe we shouldn't count them. See First also sold them. I'm not aware of earlier ramdisks, but at and prior to that time RAM would have been magnetic core, which changes the value proposition a bit: a core ramdisk is more like an SSD than anything else, because RAM contents weren't lost if power was lost.
It was also common to use ramdisks in MS-DOS around that time. Bankswitching was part of the reason: starting in 01985 you could easily put several megs of bank-switched RAM on a LIM EMS board in even an original IBM PC, but most application programs couldn't use more than a meg at all (or more than 640K without difficulty), so a ramdisk was an easy way to get some use out of it.
And it was common to netboot SunOS in the 01980s; this usually involved making /tmp a ramdisk and NFS-mounting /, /usr, maybe /usr/share, and /var.
And the PalmPilot only had DRAM for its filesystem from 01996 until they added flash support in PalmOS 5.4 in 02004.
And most LiveCD systems copy the CD into RAM at boot time these days. And Linux usually boots from an "initramfs". I'm typing this on a Linux computer with "tmpfs" ramdisks (named after the SunOS facility, but not used for /tmp itself) mounted on /run, /dev/shm, /run/lock, /sys/fs/cgroup, and a directory in /run/user. Amazingly, there's a discussion about whether Fedora should default to swapping to a ramdisk now: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/compressed-ram-disks/
My first encounter with the concept was in 1982 during the summer working at an electronics company. We used the then new 64K DRAMs in production so there was a ready supply of devices vendors had given us for evaluation. I built a 128KB memory board with bank selection logic then wrote a driver for the Flex OS (6809) to make that memory appear like a disk. Also built a similar board with (probably, long time ago..) 27128 eproms that worked as a "ROM-Disk". I doubt I invented the ram disk. I'd probably heard of the idea somewhere, but I hadn't actually seen an implementation before the one I made.
The next year I switched to a larger company for summer work (defense contractor) and there wrote a driver for CP/M that talked to a "server" I wrote running on their VAX (via 19.2K serial). It made a large file on the VAX look like a disk to CP/M. We used this arrangement for backup -- copy all the files from the physical hard drive to the remote drive. Again I don't believe I'd seen this done before but it was a fairly obvious extension of the previous ram disk idea.
Unfortunately it turned out the group I worked for got billed by the computer dept for CPU time and I/O on the VAX and my network attached storage scheme ran up a huge bill so had to be abandoned.
And not a mention of CP/M, the 8-bit Disk Operating System that was ubiquitous till about 1985.
I still use it, but with a Z80 emulator on a 64-bit machine. One of my emulators if rendered in the real hardware of the era would have cost somewhere around 40-50 thousand dollars. These days it's merely about 140 megabytes of data tucked away in a directory
Hey that isn't the really impressive, but I did the same thing with DOS configuration files with only using software that came with DOS. I played a game that required 12 megs of RAM and I had 8. I used drivespace to compress the drive and smartdrive to create diskcache. The dos extender of the game automatically swapped to the disk, when there wasn't enough ram. With my set up, the game swapped, then drivespace compressed the data and smartdrive cached the data, and it never hit the disk during a combat anymore and became playable.
My first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program.
Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes.
Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari 810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on that system.
This was unique to Commodore. They owned MOS which made the chips so it was not as costly for them to do this. Honestly it sucked longer term because there was no way to really upgrade how the filesystem DOS worked unlike on the Apple or the Atari.
It was cool however because there were tools that offloaded things to the drive CPU. You could also write programs for copying disk that you loaded into the RAM on the drive and then disconnected them from the computer. You used the drive lights to tell you when to swap the disk.
Oh the nostalgia. I had a tape back up SCSI drive running on my Tekram and later Adaptec U19160 controller. That was premium hardware with very good Linux support. How I miss those days.
> it really just killed off having to buy an extra host bus adapter card to send the same command set.
Sometimes that stuff could get pretty baroque. Back in the day I had a 20 MB HD for my Atari 8 bit computer, which involved an adapter from the Atari proprietary bus to SCSI/SASI, then a second adapter from SCSI to the MFM HD interface. You needed one of the custom DOSes to make use of it, as the standard Atari DOS had never envisioned things like hard drives.
I remember when there was an MSDOS tree command that was 512 bytes, same as a disk block at the time.
I think it was written in assembly, and was from pc magazine or similar, can't remember the author.
not saying this as "10k is a lot", just a reminder of how ppl acheive amazing things with constraints.
Dataram used to sell RAMdisks ("BULK CORE") for PDP-11s starting in 01976, but those were hardware devices, so maybe we shouldn't count them. See First also sold them. I'm not aware of earlier ramdisks, but at and prior to that time RAM would have been magnetic core, which changes the value proposition a bit: a core ramdisk is more like an SSD than anything else, because RAM contents weren't lost if power was lost.
And ramdisks were a standard feature of Atari DOS 2.5 by 01985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_DOS
It was also common to use ramdisks in MS-DOS around that time. Bankswitching was part of the reason: starting in 01985 you could easily put several megs of bank-switched RAM on a LIM EMS board in even an original IBM PC, but most application programs couldn't use more than a meg at all (or more than 640K without difficulty), so a ramdisk was an easy way to get some use out of it.
And it was common to netboot SunOS in the 01980s; this usually involved making /tmp a ramdisk and NFS-mounting /, /usr, maybe /usr/share, and /var.
And the PalmPilot only had DRAM for its filesystem from 01996 until they added flash support in PalmOS 5.4 in 02004.
And most LiveCD systems copy the CD into RAM at boot time these days. And Linux usually boots from an "initramfs". I'm typing this on a Linux computer with "tmpfs" ramdisks (named after the SunOS facility, but not used for /tmp itself) mounted on /run, /dev/shm, /run/lock, /sys/fs/cgroup, and a directory in /run/user. Amazingly, there's a discussion about whether Fedora should default to swapping to a ramdisk now: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/compressed-ram-disks/
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