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Around 1995(?) Erol's Internet used a static RAM based ram-drive device to process email for its tens (hundreds?) of thousands of users. Its larger brother was used to handle Usenet. Unfortunately the Usenet feed was growing like crazy and soon that large drive could not handle it.

... In 2010 some slightly nutty young engineers who heard about that story from the grey beards they worked with at a future very well known company on a very large mysql instance used a monster ramdisk as a single master to achieve a crazy boost in performance. The hard data persistence was achieved via replication to the regular spinning rust slaves. While it worked really well for their application no one ever battle tested bad crashes in production...

... that led to a product around 2013(?)-2014(?) from Violin Memory which combined the ramdisk with if I recall correctly spinning disks to dump the data in case of a power loss. The devices were absolutely amazing but did not create a foot hold in the market. I think they sold a few hundred units total. The product was abandoned in favor of flash arrays

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nebula8804|3 years ago

OMG Erol's internet was my first ISP as a kid in elementary school here in NJ. It provided my first experiences into the web and I remember it fondly because of that.

One of the first tech based mistakes I ever made was to convince my parents to switch from Erols(which had decent ping times on online gaming) to AOL (which had horrendously bad ping times) all because I thought I was missing out on the exclusive content that AOL provided. I do recall fun memories living in AOL's walled garden but giving up that ping time was horrendously bad. I once ripped out the phone wire from the jack in extreme frustration (first time tech made me angry lol!)

We eventually switched to Earthlink(and then I think Juno?) once the AOL 1 year contract was up. Excellent ping times but man Erols will always have that spot in my memories.

I miss all the excitement and innovation happening back then. I wish we still had mom and pop stores providing things like internet services. Even startups today don't feel like they could be done as simple "mom n pop" enterprises although im sure there are plenty hiding in places we dont often look.