Comment by dboreham

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.