Jeff Walther wrote: > An external 800K floppy drive was over $100 when I started looking, > way back when.
You mean 1986-ish, when the Mac Plus was top of the range? By 1987, if you were going to splash out a bit more and buy a SE, the *cheap* version came with two internal floppy drives. > I managed for years with 2.5 MB of RAM and used about > 1 MB of that as a RAM disk. I could stick the OS and stripped down > Word (3 or 5, don't remember), Must have been 3. I've managed to squeeze Word 4, a stripped-to-the- bare-bones System 3.2 and the MiniFinder from Finder 5.3 into a single 800K disk, but I wouldn't recommend it. The proper way to do this is to load the contents of the system disk onto the RAMdisk, then eject it and load the applications from a separate disk; eject that, and work with your data files on a real disk, in case of power cuts. > just the app, none of the extras, in > the RAM disk and load the floppy for saving documents. > > When I found an 800K floppy for the amazing low price of $80, it was > a big improvement, but I continued to use the RAM disk because of the > speed. The RAM disk was Soooooo speedy compared to floppy access. It's so fast that it almost obviates the need to use Switcher. (This was before Switcher became MultiFinder.) A stroke of good luck that, because you needed all the memory you could get for a RAM disk. These days, where 4M in a Plus is a bare minimum, I use a 2.5M RAM disk, have a nice fat System 6.0.8, and rarely fill the whole RAM disk with applications. > Not necessarily. Peripherals seem to vanish/be discarded/break, > before obsolete machines reach market. Especially if the machine > and extras leave the hands of the original owner before selling. [Many valid points snipped, because I have nothing to add to them.] > I'm not sure the Classic deserves Road Apple status, but it sure > could have been better for little cost. That's what I'm getting at. The Classic was clearly designed as a replacement for the Plus; although it also replaced the SE, this fact had no input into the Classic's design. Similarly, the Classic 2 was designed to replace the Classic, and it was just tough shit that it simultaneously replaced the superior SE/30. If, by 1989, the Plus had been consigned to history and the SE FDHD was the cheap entry-level Mac in Apple's line-up, the designers would have had to have started from that perspective instead. Then these low-cost improvements you call for would assuredly have happened. > The Classic has two big flaws in my opinion. First, > what's with the proprietary memory expansion? That's just stupid. Presumably, it was to reuse the existing design of the memory sub-system of the Plus and SE, where a resistor or switch had to be set to tell the motherboard the size of the memory in bank 0; (but once it had been told that, the CPU and ROM could take over and auto-detect the memory in bank 1. I don't know the full details.) If, for any weird reason you wanted a 1M Classic, you could have one, but everyone got the memory card for free with their 2M Classic, and Apple should really have bitten the bullet and soldered 2M straight onto the motherboard. > Second, as late as it was released, they should have used a variant > on the Mac Portable or Powerbook 100 ROMs and gone with a memory map > that supported 8 MB of RAM. Four MB of RAM was too little for such a > late release date. I think they wanted to re-use as much of the Plus ROM code as possible, to ensure a small ROM size. As well as saving time and money in development, this left enough ROM space unused to allow Apple to implement the System 6.0.3 ROM disk. -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
