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From: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Cheap ROM Upgrade Works!!!
Message-ID: <1105@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 17-Aug-86 13:25:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: jade.1105
Posted: Sun Aug 17 13:25:10 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 19-Aug-86 04:00:33 EDT
References: <1914@dciem.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Distribution: net
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 35

In article <1914@dciem.UUCP> frank@dciem.UUCP (Frank Evans) writes:
>I took my brother's third party modified 512K Mac and my Mac+ and 
>exchanged the ROMs.

He goes on to talk about wanting to use an external 800k floppy drive on
an old 512k Mac, and not wanting to pay apple for the upgrade.

Frank,
  If all you want is to use an 800k external floppy drive on your old 512k
Mac, Just put the file called "HD20" in the system folder of your boot-up
disks.  HD20 was written by Apple and, like all Apple system software,
available at no recompense to Apple on compuserve and from any Mac users
group. Y
  You should also upgrade your system files to System version 3.2 and 3.2
Imagewriter version 2.3, and Finder version 5.3.  These files will be on
the same users group disk with the current release of the HD20 file.
These are the current release of the operating system and are, from
Apple's point of view, a free upgrade.  (You may have to pay the Mac
users group for the disk though.)
  Using this software release patches your old roms so that new software,
relying on some of the services of the new roms, will continue to run on your
machine.
  I think it is very decent of Apple to distribute revised system software
this way.  You don't see IBM/Microsoft doing it.
  If you want to boot up from an 800k floppy, you will need the new roms.
I think Apple is being quite fair to charge what they charge for the
bundled internal drive upgrade and rom upgrade.  Apple wants both to make
money, and to be fair to its customers.  Other companies, who fear their
roms being reverse-engineered, refuse to make new roms available to old
cutomers at all.  (Try to get your IBM PCjr
upgraded to a real PC, for example.  I'm sorry to keep beating on IBM, but
they are after all, the standard for support in the industry.)
--- David Phillip Oster		-- "The goal of Computer Science is to
Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu  -- build something that will last at
Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster     -- least until we've finished building it."