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From: toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: The Apple IIf
Message-ID: <1990Feb28.062718.29230@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 90 06:27:18 GMT
References: <10892.net.apple@pro-lep> <1990Feb27.032627.16301@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu> <1990Feb27.044441.8715@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
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Organization: California Institute of Technology
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dcw@lcs.mit.edu (David C. Whitney) writes:

>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

I contend that the amount of writing you will do in normal operation will
be nowhere near enough to make the speed a problem. I don't care how slow
the write is, I lock my system disk most of the time anyway and booting
speed is my major concern.

>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

I heartily agree. And with 150 ns DRAMs you could easily page mode them at
4 MB/sec which is -- guess what -- synchronous SCSI, supported (so I hear) by
the new SCSI DMA card!

There actually are solid state SCSI disks out there but they all seem to think
that you want 20 megs or more so they are mondo expensive. I just want 1 meg
or so for my boot disk, I can use floppies for everything else because it
is then reasonable to swap application and data disks which is not much of a
problem.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu