Elden and Bob both graduated in the class of '95 with Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering degrees from Walla Walla College. They then went their separate ways -- Elden to Vancouver (not British Columbia), and Bob to Redmond (not Microsoft). Even though both were still in Washington State, they lived four hours apart, so the projects they worked on together during college wouldn't be possible.

Or would they?

So far there have been four NerdFest gatherings. NerdFest I was in Redmond from the eighteenth to twentieth of August, 1995. NerdFest II was in Bellingham, Washington (the home of another college EE nerd buddy) from the twenty-first to the twenty-third of October. NerdFest III occurred from the eighth to the tenth of March in 1996, in Vancouver, Washington, and NerdFest IV came back to Redmond from the third to the fifth of May.

At each NerdFest everyone present worked on some project of nerdly import. While others were slaving away on hardware projects, watching lame movies, and procrastinating on other projects, Elden and Bob worked on the mother of all Macintosh RAM disk programs.

Other programs were limited to one RAM disk available at a time, so ramBunctious can have any number of RAM disks available simultaneously.

Other programs were limited to saving the contents only at quit time, or not at all; ramBunctious, therefore, includes a write-through features that updates the RAM disk image file.

Other programs use costly system heap memory or, worse, high memory above BufPtr that cannot be easily reclaimed. So ramBunctious uses temporary memory -- the same memory used by applications. When the RAM disk is unmounted, that memory is immediately available for more applications.

While other programs leave their users in the darkness of helplessness, ramBunctious allows its users to bask in the glow of balloon help.

 ramBunctious features an interesting symbol. This is a simplified hurricane symbol. The reason for this is that at NerdFest I, we started working on this project at the same time that Hurricane Felix was threatening the southern East Coast of the United States, so we used Felix as the code name for our RAM disk project. The name eventually was changed to ramBunctious, but the icons stay as a memorial to the roots of the project. Plus, it looks purty cool.