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From: erics@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Eric Schlegel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Tail Patching and ROM replacement
Message-ID: <17539@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 1 Dec 89 20:24:32 GMT
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: erics@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Eric Schlegel)
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Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 22

A completely new solution to the tail-patching dilemma: the problem with
tail-patching arises from:
    1. There are ROM bugs.
    2. Rewriting entire routines take too much memory, and...
    3. Releasing new ROMs is impractical for several reasons (cost, user
       installation, etc.), so...
    4. Apple bug-fixes using come-from patches.

HOWEVER: in this week's Infoworld was an article about Intel's Flash EEPROMs.
These are ROM chips that are easily erasable and reprogramable without any
fancy ultraviolet hardware, etc. Now, would it be feasible for Apple to use
Flash EEPROMs in future machines, and thus a new system release would contain
a 512K ROM image that would be automatically loaded into the system ROMs.
Bugs in ROM routines can be fixed BY REWRITING the routine in the new ROM
image; there's no RAM usage, no come-from patching necessary, no user
installation problems, no muss, no fuss.

This _is_ a serious suggestion.  What do you think? Has Apple looked at
this possibility?

-eric
eric.schlegel@dartmouth.edu