Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uokmax!d.cs.okstate.edu!minich
From: minich@d.cs.okstate.edu (Robert Minich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Why VM? (was Re: New Macintosh Strategy)
Message-ID: <1990Oct30.093218.12931@d.cs.okstate.edu>
Date: 30 Oct 90 09:32:18 GMT
References: <1990Oct30.075308.15261@world.std.com>
Distribution: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Organization: Oklahoma State University
Lines: 80

by boris@world.std.com (Boris Levitin):
| ewm@mdavcr.UUCP (Eric W. Mitchell) writes that virtual memory is a feature
| that people who "only" do wordprocessing and simple office tasks do, in fact,
| need.
| 
| Now, I don't like puny 8MHz-68000-type machines with puny little 1MB RAMs
| any more than Mr. Mitchell does.

This is called being spoiled. :-) After all, many people are most
definitely squeezing their finances when they but that "lowly" Classic.
If nothing else, they should get some more memory if possible.

| (Typically, only people who are either unaware of what they can do with
| powerful machines or are intellectually lazy are happy with Pluses, SEs
| and Classics in their standard configuration; likewise, many DOS users
| who have never experienced a Mac don't feel the need for one, living as they
| do in the North Korea of the computer world.)

These people are lucky to think they're happy. The rest of us get to
keep the economy from going into a slump by upgrading whenever we can
afford to. (Or at least make someone ELSE think they can afford to!)

| But VM is rather beside that point.  I do rather intensive multitasking in
| my 4MB (soon to be 5MB) RAM, as the LC-owning secretaries/English students
| will also be able to do.  (At $37-odd per 1MB SIMM, stuffing your Mac to
| the limit with RAM is cheaper than getting a 68030 model.)  Why these
| people need VM into the double-digit megabyte range is beyond me,
| especially considering that the virtual part of that RAM will be unbearably
| slow (I've used Ready-Set-Go with its down-your-throat VM facility, and
| I've tried Word's load-only-used- portion-of-document thing, and as a
| result, I'm less excited about VM than practically any other System 7.0
| feature).  VM is for people who need RAM beyond the generous physical RAM
| limits of every Mac down to the Plus.

  Perhaps, but I think you're missing the point of VM entirely. It's not
that disk is so much cheaper than RAM and you only need RAM as some
sort of cache (!) but rather you only need enough RAM to satisfy your
average working conditions. For most people, this means that if they can
run each of their programs INDIVIDUALLY in X MB of RAM, then they can
run as many applications as VM will hold, with X MB of RAM for the
foreground task. Sure, there will be a bit of swapping as you switch
programs, but that's better than having to quit another program first!
  Also, 4MB is not what I'd call generous today. How about 16MB or so?
Generous is when I have trouble _trying_ to run out of RAM. :-) (Like
this new UNIX box with 160MB of RAM. Even with oodles of CS students,
nothing ever gets swapped and most disk access is out of a cache!) In a
couple years, 4MB will feel like 512K does today...

| That
| means serious (particularly color) DTPers, people who do animation or
| rendering, video and sound editing, CAD, work with Mathematica or run A/UX --
| in other words, do things that, on a Mac, can be done with virtual memory
| or expensive RAM NuBus cards or not at all.

  Except for possibly A/UX, I don't know of any products in the categories
above that can take advantage of NuBus RAM thanks to the 8MB limit on
RAM which the Mac OS can handle. This is one thing I'd like to see
promptly fixed.


| Now, with all the multitasking capabilities the Mac has today, the world is
| still alarmingly full of those pathetic 8MHz-68000, 1MB RAM Macs.

Don't forget how alarmingly many more 4MHz IBM PCs are out there...

| Wanting VM
| while such suffering is so commonplace is like living in the USSR and wanting
| Communism;

or living in the US and wanting Capitalism. :-) :-) :-)

| let's concentrate on the doable and the realistic first, like a
| 16MHz 020 (at least) and 4MB RAM in every pot.

There are just too many people who can't afford to not "suffer."  Sorry.
-- 
|_    /| | Robert Minich            |
|\'o.O'  | Oklahoma State University| A fanatic is one who sticks to 
|=(___)= | minich@d.cs.okstate.edu  | his guns -- whether they are 
|   U    | - Ackphtth               | loaded or not.