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From: chapman@ug.cs.dal.ca (Paul Chapman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: ROM Disk and other machines?
Summary: MacJanet is Waaaay too slow
Message-ID: <1990Nov11.012533.8672@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 11 Nov 90 01:25:33 GMT
References: <1990Nov9.032405.13315@cs.utk.edu> <1990Nov9.044036.7385@cs.umn.edu> <1990Nov9.163823.29938@cs.utk.edu>
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Organization: Math, Stats & CS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
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In article <1990Nov9.163823.29938@cs.utk.edu> wnn@ornl.gov (Wolfgang N. Naegeli) writes:
>In article <1990Nov9.044036.7385@cs.umn.edu> kanefsky@cs.umn.edu (Steve 
>Kanefsky) writes:
>> Come to think of it, I can't imagine how slow it would be to have a lab
>> full of Classics running diskless over LocalTalk (or PhoneNet or 
>whatever).
>> Perhaps with some extra RAM and a healthy RAM cache...
>
>Many schools really are on a shoestring budget and willing to sacrifice 
>performance for having the basic capability at all. I know of a couple of 
>labs that boot off a floppy, but run all their applications off the server.

  Here at the Dal UCIS Computer Centre (or whatever it's called), they have
Mac Pluses set up so that they boot from an internal floppy and then run
from the server like that. The network is MacJanet and it is guaranteed to
drive you bezerk before you can get anything done on the machines. I have
never used AppleShare, so I can't comment on it but if you want an idea of
how slow I'm talking, think of trying to connect to a server over a modem
(maybe a bit of an exaggeration but the setup makes floppies look speedy).

>Once an application is running, little access is made to the System 
>Folder. If you select your applications carefully, you can get pretty 
>decent performance even with some 20 machines off a single AppleShare 
>server. WriteNow, for example, preforms admirably in such situations.

  Ever tried to run PageMaker? I'm serious, they've got that on the
network! It literally takes 5 minutes to load. WriteNow's a lot better,
but Macintosh programs usually only load a part of themselves when you
start up, so there's a big delay when you click on anything, pull down
a menu, etc etc. Remember, there's 20 other people competing for the
network, as well as several people printing things over it as well.
 
> [nice things said of WriteNow]
>
>**************************************************************
>Wolfgang N. Naegeli
>Internet: wnn@ornl.gov     Bitnet: wnn@ornlstc
>Phone: 615-574-6143        Fax: 615-574-6141 (MacFax)
>QuickMail (QM-QM): Wolfgang Naegeli @ 615-574-4510
>Snail: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6206
>**************************************************************

  Although I suppose MacJanet is better than nothing, I am currently
confined to using the MS-DOS computers in the next room. Much though I
would like to use the Macs, they're just too slooow. A friend of mine who
uses an Amiga got an unfairly bad impression of Macintoshes after he spent a
good afternoon trying to get something productive out of them.

Just throwing in my 2 cents' worth (about 1.6 cents U.S. :)

- Paul
-- 
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