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From: tdn@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA (Thomas Newton)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Re Re "insufficient memory" error msg.
Message-ID: <367@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 5-May-85 01:12:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmu-cs-s.367
Posted: Sun May  5 01:12:46 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 7-May-85 20:47:08 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 28

It isn't a MacTerminal problem; it's a Finder problem.  The Finder stashes
away copies of every icon that it sees into the Desktop file.  However, it
never updates an icon entry -- either to replace it when an application gets
a new icon, or to remove it when the file is deleted from the disk.  Disks
that are used for downloading (with *any* terminal program) tend to have a
very large Desktop file because they have "seen" many more applications than
most of the disks in your collection.

The problem doesn't just happen with disks that are used for downloading.
I have several disks that are full of small files.  Copying files between
one data disk and another (on my two-drive system) often involves copying
files to the System disk (thereby increasing the size of its Desktop),
ejecting the first data disk and throwing its image away, inserting the
second data disk, copying the files to it, and finally deleting them from
the system disk.  Many is the time that I've wanted to take a sledgehammer
to my 128K Mac (in the style of Apple's anti-IBM-PC ads) because it won't
let me work with three disks.

When the Mac does let me work with three disks, I sometimes wind up getting
screwed anyway.  It seems that the Mac doesn't like to give up the System
disk as easily as a data disk, and if I insert the second data disk into the
external drive, the Mac will leave the internal drive sitting idle and force
me to swap disks in and out of the external drive.

The DOS on my Atari 800 is a lot better than the Finder in this respect.  If
I want to copy files between two disks, I just put the two diskettes into the
drives and tell it to copy between them.  If only copying files on the Mac was
this simple . . .