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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Kids these days don't know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
or defragging a disk.
I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can't remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can't remember what the different memory types were called either.
IIRC the application was just "edit.com", as in "edit autoexec.bat". The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game--maybe you didn't load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes--you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
I figured it out - it was memmaker. It automatically edited autoexec.bat (and possibly also config.sys, I'm not sure).
Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.
Well, at least in our case, it wasn't something that we bought. I'm pretty sure it came with our MS-DOS.
Oh, you're right, it's right there in the link you shared--it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn't have, and then later we did.
You ran emm386.com as a TSR (terminate, stay present) to set up extended memory according to my very stretched memory
That might have been one way of doing it, but I seem to remember a more mnemonic name - something like "memmaker," perhaps?
Edit: Yep, it was memmaker.
memmaker?
That was it, yes.