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From: doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee)
Newsgroups: net.micro.cbm
Subject: Re: Commodore's Lorraine
Message-ID: <395@terak.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Feb-85 12:02:39 EST
Article-I.D.: terak.395
Posted: Tue Feb 26 12:02:39 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Mar-85 20:47:03 EST
References: <773@topaz.ARPA>
Organization: Terak Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ, USA
Lines: 50

[ Can anyone really want more than 7 Megabytes? ]

>  Sure,  you  could  expect  tp  pay  that  much  from  any   *other*
> manafacturer. Don't forget, Commodore can make their own chips  (MOS
> Technology) .

True.  But so far MOS Technology has shown its strength to be in making
special-purpose chips like SIDs and VICs.  They really trailed the
industry in coming out with 64K DRAMs.  For the first two years the
C-64 was made with outside-vendor 64K DRAMs.  And since 256K DRAMs seem
to be done exclusively in CMOS while MOS Technology's expertise and
manufacturing capability is in NMOS, it'll be a few years before MOS
Technology is producing 256K or 1M DRAMs.  By then the Lorraine will
probably be obsolete (from Commodore's point of view).

Also, so far Commodore has stayed away from "upgrade" kits.  But then,
Jack Tramiel isn't running the show any more, so who knows.

>  What could you use 7 Meg for? - How about a Multi user system based
> on UN*X? Use it in the office, for data sampling, in a school... 

Just what I was afraid you were going to say.  In any given system,
(computer or otherwise) there is some component which limits the
performance.  This is lovingly called a "bottleneck".  It doesn't
matter how much you improve everything else, if you can't improve
the bottleneck things won't run faster.  In a 68000-based Unix(tm)
system, the memory is the bottleneck up to about 2Mb.  Above that
point, the 68000 becomes the bottleneck.  Putting 7Mb on a 68000-
based Unix system is a waste of money.

> Picture as many RAM disks as you could ever need...

How many *is* that?  7Mb is a *lot* of RAM disks.  I would suggest
that 2Mb would be "as many RAM disks as you could ever need..."

> favorite game in one window and your terminal program in another.

For this you need 7Mb??????  How about maybe 1MB?

> Start with 512K, if you want more it's
> available.

And you can start with a VW Beetle and upgrade it to a cement mixer
truck.  But nobody would (I don't think anybody has).  The point is
that the cost of memory is so high that if you really wanted a
multi-user Unix system, you'd simply buy a purpose-built system with
a reasonable powerful CPU, and probably an MMU and an FPU, instead
of trying to turn a home game-playing computer into a poor imitation.
-- 
Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug