Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!cc.utah.edu!tjacobs
From: TJACOBS@cc.utah.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: 7point0beta1...
Message-ID: <100685@cc.utah.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 90 19:52:25 GMT
Lines: 25

I heard that 7.0 b1 was so closely followed by b2 that they decided to wait
and send b2 instead.

At the new Mac rollout they demonstrated b1 a little and had the occasion to
play with it and it is NICE! The beta seems a lot faster than the alphas. It
is very quick to switch from one application to another. The "find" feature
seemed to work faster and was stable (it seemed to crash a lot in the alphas).
It's all a bit smaller too. The Finder is a bit over 300k and the System 550k 
or so on the installer disk. That may mean that you can build a minimal system
for a specific mac on a 800k disk!

I think alphas may have had the MultiFinder code in the Finder. The b1
definitely has it in the System file. Which means you can use some other shell
other than the Finder if necessary and still have multitasking.

It appears to be stable, I haven't had it crash more than about once or twice
and this was running off a floppy disk that I know has format problems.
It complained about memory for some reason on a 5meg cx.

It still has one problem which I have reported with alphas. You can't alias
the special folders in the system folder and have the original folders
elsewhere. Meaning that aliases in the system folder won't work as the special
folders (Apple Menu Folder, Extensions, Control Panels, etc).

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, I didn't get any of this from the University.