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From: gdavis@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Gary Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Mac II Crash
Message-ID: <251@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 15:38:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: rhesus.251
Posted: Wed Oct 14 15:38:41 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Oct-87 04:15:22 EDT
Organization: UW-Madison Primate Center
Lines: 26


     I recently had an interesting crash on my Mac II. I was working with
Acta and decided to look up a word with the WordFinder thesaurus DA.
Bang! Bus error, ID 01. I had just typed in a lot of material and expected to
lose it when I restarted the machine, the only option available. Instead,
when I clicked Restart  Acta threw up a Save dialog and successfully
saved my file before the Mac rebooted.

     I've never seen anything like that before. Could it be a feature of Acta,
the Mac II or System 4.1? Out of curiosity I repeated the same sequence of
events a second time, but I didn't pursue it further to see what conditions
it may occur under. It is too common for crashes on the Mac II to mess up
the PRAM, causing the Mac to forget about the hard disk and the keyboard,
rather of a pain. This was the only time I've had a crash with commercial
software, but I've had many with public domain stuff. However, I have
found it much easier to crash LightSpeed Pascal on the II than on the Plus,
where it's almost impossible to bring the System down.

     I should say that I've been generally quite happy with WordFinder, and
it's worked nicely with quite a few programs, even LightSpeed Pascal,
which often doesn't deal well with DAs. I don't know that the crash was
it's fault. My only disappointment with WordFinder is it's word selection. I
bought it after seeing an ad featuring a recommendation from Bill Buckley.
I don't care for his politics, but I do like his word usage, and I expected to
find such words in the thesaurus. It does have an extensive set of
synonyms for most words I've checked, but they're rather more sober and ordinary than I had hoped.