Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!sunic!tut!santra!kampi.hut.fi!jmunkki
From: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacPluses and system 7.0
Message-ID: <1990Jan3.014720.8959@santra.uucp>
Date: 3 Jan 90 01:47:20 GMT
References: <7645@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <1990Jan1.015227.11586@santra.uucp> <43481@improper.coherent.com>
Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system)
Reply-To: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 49

My description of the System ROMDisk was not clear enough, since Dave Platt
misunderstood an important part of the idea.

I didn't suggest that you could fit a complete System disk in just 512K or
1MB. You wouldn't want to do that for many of the reasons that Dave just
mentioned. You could instead put a lot of stuff that is common to all and
that doesn't change often (like WDEF, CDEF, LDEF, PACK, FONT, ' snd', ...)
in the ROMdisk and open it at startup time. The mechanism should be built
in to the system and should work the way SuitCase currently does.

From what I have read, I gather that SuitCase functionality will be in
System 7.0 anyway, so moving a few resources to a ROM disk and keeping
the main system file on a regular floppy sounds like a relatively easy
thing to do.

This way you could fit a stripped System and Finder on a 800K disk. You
would have 800K+the amount of ROMDisk for the total system. You could
use most of that 800K for your printer drivers and any international or
personal stuff that you want in your system.

If you had 512K or 1MB of RAM in addition to the ROM, your startup floppy
could be copied to this RAM and then ejected so that a data/document
disk could be inserted in the disk drive. I don't think that a RAM disk
is safe enough for work data, but it would be fine for applications and
system software that was just copied from a floppy.

BTW: I have noticed that the first directory track is almost always the
first to fail on a diskette. Most people keep a "boot disk" with their
favorite (small) word processor and printer drivers. They also keep all
their latest files on that disk and never copy these files to new disks.
Eventually the directory track just wears out and they bring the disk
to me for recovery. Having a ROM/RAM combination disk on public macs would
change the habits of these people and make them use one disk for booting
and others for data.

I know it's not fair of me to say that "_they_'ll never do it", but it's
just my way of teasing Apple. If it bothers people, just let me know and
I'll stop posting these funny suggestions...

Saying that Portable users have hard disks anyway is like saying that
Apple doesn't sell Portables without a hard disk. In theory you can get
a Portable without the hard disk. I don't know if people are doing that,
but it would be funny of Apple to introduce something that no one would
buy. (Ok, this Portable does have a hard disk...)

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|     Juri Munkki jmunkki@hut.fi  jmunkki@fingate.bitnet        I Want   Ne   |
|     Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre        My Own   XT   |
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