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From: lrm3@ellis.uchicago.edu (Lawrence Reed Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: 32-bits: what's the big deal?
Message-ID: <1991May20.060526.26906@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 20 May 91 06:05:26 GMT
References: <674696625.0@blkcat.FidoNet>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (NewsMistress)
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In article <674696625.0@blkcat.FidoNet> Charlie.Mingo@p4218.f421.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Charlie Mingo) writes:
>may introduce compatability problems, and (ii) 13 Mb of virtual is "enough":
>enough for almost anything I could conceivably run; even enough for Mathematica.
[stuff deleted]
>
>    So all you netters out there who have been baying and woofing for 32-bit
>clean ROMs, tell me one thing:  what would you do with 32-bits if you got them?

One application where you need gobs & gobs of RAM is in programming scientific
computer simualtions.  Often you need to have HUGE arrays of numbers, etc., and
even with clever packing schemes you still as much memory as you can get.  You
may not need 20 or 32 MB RAM for what _you_ are doing, but I think that there
are lots of us who would benefit greatly if we could actually use all of the
RAM Apple told us our machines could address.  Numerical simulations can be
real memory hogs.  Ever tried animating full screen 8-bit color graphics with
programs like Spyglass?  There are some applications for which you _need_ lots
of RAM.

If you have 3 cards in a IIcx, you can only have 11 MB of memory.  Oooh.  A
whole 3 MB more than I could under system 6.  I am not impressed.  What a
waste of a perfectly good 68030.

The point is, Apple shipped machines which could not perform as specified in
the manuals & adds.  They provided the machines with a slot which could fix
the problem.  They advertized the slot.  Now they seem to be refusing to fix
the problem, even though most people are willing to _pay_ for a ROM upgrade.
We (or at least I) want a solution from Apple, not a 3rd party vendor.  This
way we will know that our machines will continue to function in the future.

Say, my IIcx is under AppleCare.  Do you suppose my dealer will "fix" this
"defect"? [probably not]

Lawrence Miller