Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!csi.uottawa.ca!news
From: cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne (055908))
Subject: Re: T1000SE: possible to use ROM C: drive?
Message-ID: <1991Feb27.215507.1178@csi.uottawa.ca>
Keywords: n
Sender: news@csi.uottawa.ca
Nntp-Posting-Host: prgc
Organization: CSI Dept., University of Ottawa
References: <1991Feb27.014550.8002@ecf.utoronto.ca>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 91 21:55:07 GMT

How would one "use" that ROM differently?  It's Read Only Memory, which
means that its contents can't be changed...  Have you heard of some alternative
ROM chip that can be plugged in instead?  I can't think of any OTHER way
of changing the use of the C: ROMS...

>Compared to the size of memory T10000SE has, that part memory (256k) is 
>really a waste.  What's more puzzling is that T1000SE's C drive, the ROM
>drive, does NOT have a whole version of DOS.  I wonder why.

Certainly NOT a waste.  It IS incomplete - I'd sure like to have GWBASIC
in ROM, or some of the other DOS utilities added, but this is certainly
better than nothing.  A lot of other laptops require that you run DOS from
a floppy.  To boot, you MUST have a floppy in the drive, and to use ANY
of the DOS utilities, you typically need to have SOME sort of drive in
action (on a desktop machine, you need a \DOS directory on the hard drive).

What's there is certainly not useless.  I suppose that they found that the
WHOLE set of utilities wouldn't fit on one chip, so they tossed out the ones
that someone decided were "least useful."  Having 256K of utilities sitting
there NOT taking up disk/RamDrive space is certainly nice.

>Has anybody tried to use that part of ROM?  Do you guys have a complete
>DOS on C: drive?  It is quite annoying that I have to resort to floppy to
>do things like 'sort', or 'append'.

I boot from that ROM several times each week.  It would be nice to have the
extra features in ROM, but that's the price you pay for not having a hard
drive :-).  And when I want to sort stuff, I don't use DOS's SORT anyway...
I use the one published recently in PC Magazine...  What I wish is that they'd
have put a REAL editor in instead of EDLIN, but I hear that EDLIN doesn't get
trashed until DOS 5.0...  That's a pity...

-- 
Christopher Browne
cbbrowne@csi.uofottawa.ca
University of Ottawa
Master of System Science Program