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From: resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: MacClassic & System 7.0
Message-ID: <1990Sep21.013544.28362@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 90 01:35:44 GMT
References: <12280@accuvax.nwu.edu> <70500035@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 40

gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>The "4MB Bottleneck" may soon become as bad as the "640K" bottleneck
>on the IBM PC's.  Mathematica is nearly unusable with only 4 megs of
>memory -- you run out of memory after 10 minutes of use.  I expect
>that system 7.0 will make mathematica UNUSABLE on a 4Mb machine.  And
>we can expect things to get much worse in the future.

>If a certain Macintosh cannot support virtual memory, then it should
>be possible to expand the main memory to 8-12 megabytes, to compensate
>for this deficiency.  But the mac SE is designed with a built-in 4Mb
>limitation.  While this originally was a selling point of the II
>series, it will soom become an anchor around Apple's throat.

>Don W. Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois

**FLAME ON**
It would take a person in a computer science department.....
The only reason that software becomes unusable on a 4MB machine
is because developer's have forgotten how to write small code. An
inordinate number of applications that are out today are just plain
PIGS. 4MEG???? 32K was a big damn deal 10 years ago; 640K in the
PC made me drool. Now, I assume that something like Mathematica
would need some larger amount of memory than, say, MacWrite ever
did, but dieing with 4MB???? Just because hardware technology
progresses orders of magnitude faster than software *technology*
does not mean that we compenstate with software *size* and design
*stupidity*.

People who declare 50 Str255's in a program are probably doing it
wrong!
**FLAME OFF**

Thank you. I needed that.
pr
--
Pete Resnick             (...so what is a mojo, and why would one be rising?)
Graduate assistant - Philosophy Department, Gregory Hall, UIUC
System manager - Cognitive Science Group, Beckman Institute, UIUC
Internet/ARPAnet/EDUnet  : resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu
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