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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Should we support 64K ROMs anymore?
Message-ID: <1366@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sun, 30-Nov-86 17:31:10 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1366
Posted: Sun Nov 30 17:31:10 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Nov-86 20:59:24 EST
References: <385@runx.OZ>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 27

Well, at Centram this has never been an issue.  There are tens of thousands
of Macintoshes with old ROMs in use, and so it would be insane not to
support them, or to add an effective $300 additional cost (for the upgrade)
in order to use our product.  Consider a site with 1000 Macintoshes, which
is not particularly unusual at universities these days.  It would cost
$300,000 to upgrade all those Macs.  That is not likely to be available.

I feel that it was a big mistake to price the new ROMs so high, and not to
provide a RAM-based version of the new operating system.  Apple seems
consistently resistant to issues of customer goodwill and developer
convenience; as a result they have little customer loyalty.  It is my hope
that someone will re-implement the Macintosh operating system in MPW C
(which is highly optimized and comparable to maintainable hand-written
assembly language in efficiency) and take over its support and distribution.

It was, after all, only 64K of code originally, which is only a few
man-months of effort in a high-level language; Apple has, in my opinion,
over-estimated the difficulty of re-implementing the Mac OS, because they
fail to separate design from implementation (obviously, the design part is
already done) and because they employed only assembly language and the
atrocity called Lisa Pascal (slow compiler, producing slow code that had to
be hand-optimized) in implementation, causing long delays.  However,
everyone seems to have accepted Apple's estimates.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)