[myself248]

Yeah, MS was ultra behind. Scramdisk came out in 1998 or 99 as I recall.

I wasn't working in IT so I have no idea what corporate policy was like at the time, but it was highly recommended in hacker circles. It can't have been that hard.

[Alupis]

Rather, things like Scramdisk were ahead of their time and nearly exclusively for enthusiasts and security gurus.

In the early 2000's, any sort of encryption was a non-trivial burden on already slow (by today's standards) systems. Plus the whole export encryption fiasco and more.

I'd say FDE didn't really take off until your mobile devices started to offer it by default, and make it easy enough that regular users don't ever need to think about it. Now pretty much all operating systems support FDE "out of the box".

Saying folks should have been running FDE back in the early 2000's is just absurd, really.