Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!dcw
From: dcw@lcs.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: The Apple IIf
Message-ID: <1990Feb27.044441.8715@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 90 04:44:41 GMT
References: <10892.net.apple@pro-lep> <1990Feb27.032627.16301@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Sender: news@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Spoken Language Systems Group
Lines: 36

In article <1990Feb27.032627.16301@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu> toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) writes:
>[ somebody wrote, about EEPROMS ]
>
>>> (128K) to put on my AST Ramstak+.  I _think_ they're pretty slow, too
>>>200 ns or so.
>
>200ns is fast for EPROMs and EEPROMs. If you want them faster it costs big time
>and as long as you are using them as a solid state disk they really don't need
>to have an awesome access time anyway.

I don't know about reading times, but I do know that EEPROMS are slow
as hell for writing. It takes about 5 minutes to burn a 64k ROM. Ever
try to rename a laserwriter? It takes forever! Setting up a system
disk could take an hour or more. Sure, you do it once, but you do it
again for dropping in new NDAs, updating icon files, etc. In other
words, you'll always be twiddling the system disk, and it'll be SLOW.

We'd be better off off with a SCSI interface to a big board with a
pile of SIMM slots on it. A SCSI ram disk. Upgradeable at your leisure
(and as RAM prices drop). Fragmentation becomes a non-issue (unless
you like counting microseconds). No noise (I mean that chatter of
thrashing read-write heads). A year ago this would be laughed away as
too expensive. RAM is about twice as expensive now as hard disks were
two years ago (yeah, a bad comparison). I estimate that in a year or
two RAM prices for small amounts will cost roughly the same as the
same amount of magnetic memory.

>Todd Whitesel
>toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu


--
Dave Whitney
dcw@sun-bear.lcs.mit.edu  ...!mit-eddie!sun-bear!dcw  dcw@athena.mit.edu
My employer pays me well. This, however, does not mean he agrees with me.
I wrote Z-Link & BinSCII. Send me bug reports. I use a //GS. Send me Tech Info.