That was a clever way to speed up the booting. Ram Disk was one I used on my early Macs. I also replaced the 16mhz. crystal on my Mac Plus motherboard with a 30mhz. one that made it boot quicker, made the chime higher in pitch, too.
Jeff ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2014 6:39 PM Subject: Re: Mac 30th Anniversary//Early Mac History Highlights More Mac history For you early Mac Buffs, I want you to know about something I did with my Mac 512 k In the hopes of making it work faster (remember in the beginning, there was no hard drive, everything worked off floppies and you had to keep swapping the system disk with the program disk).......through an acquaintance I got to a residence of an Apple Employee who work in the Mac Division. I lived in San Jose at that time. Backup: Remember, this is a "512k" Mac.......512killobytes of system memory (not much) So continuing, THIS guy fits up my 512k Mac with 2,000k of memory on a special board he installed in the computer (and we had to have one of the "frosty fans" on top.) So now the memory is quadrupled. But hold on, it gets better, he set me up with a system disk that LOADED the system into the RAM of that 2,000 board and then it spit the system disk out. NOW I am running the "system" solely in RAM. Are you excited yet? Can you imagine how much faster that was? Other than waiting a little for it to load the system off the floppy into that RAM, everything zinged when I would put a "software" program disk in (like Write Now or the Apple programs) because the system is being accessed in RAM, NOT from a floppy. Can you imagine that? It was fantastic and it made it MUCH MORE pleasurable to work on that computer. This was an apple employee that set me up with this "secret thing" that was NOT sold in the stores and few people had. I was so greatful or is that grateful? Later I had a 25mhz accelerator in my MAC SE which normally ran 16 Mhz as I recall and the earlier ones ran 8mhz. Later on I had accelerators that went 32mhz and hold on: 50mhz. This Apple guy told me they had Macs running.......hold on to your seat......100mhz!! Zoweeeee! Then later on, down the road with my Mac II, I had a 32megabyte RAM in it and used a program to run the system in RAM....I can't remember what that was called but I have it in a box somewhere. AGAIN - when you setup your system in RAM everything was much, MUCH Faster. Gee, maybe I should go to Flint Center, pay $100+ to get in, and ask for 3 minutes to give everyone a shot of MY early Mac history? Michael Smith In a message dated 1/9/2014 11:52:48 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes: >Hello, > >> http://www.mac30th.com > >> Tickets are $100 and up..........web links says "all proceeds donated to >> charity" > >[blinks] > >I can't speak for anyone else, but I appreciate your assigning a dollar value to the tickets. I'm signed up for the CHM's automated pesterings and all they said was: > >> You can purchase tickets to the Mac@30 Anniversary Celebration at: > >. . . . . . .with no mention whatever that ticket prices start at $100 a throw and go up from there. :/ > >My overweening Scottishness aside (blast those porridge scoffer genes! :) ), anyone vacillating over dropping $100-plus on this deal should be aware that the Flint Center seats 2,300 people. Meaning: if *do* you plan to attend in person, it might be a good idea to buy your ticket(s) sooner rather than later, as this thing has Major Geek Bragging Rights written all over it. :D > >Speaking of the Flint Center: > >>Flint Center in San Jose > >I can only hope that the above isn't a quote from the mac30th website. I say this because anyone headed to San Jose in the hopes of attending this event is likely to find it to be a rather frustrating experience, seeing as how the Flint Center (located on the De Anza College campus) is located ~20 miles driving distance from North San Jose and is, in fact, on the opposite side* of Silicon Valley. :/ > > >Best, > >James Fraser > >*A fact of which, at the risk of sounding boastful, I think I can say I'm more aware of than most people. You might agree after you've read the following: > >In the late 1980's (when the Macintosh was still The New Shiny), I won a bet with one of the guys in charge of one of the then-two Macintosh labs on the De Anza campus (I ended up working in the other one, Ghod help them, which shows you just how hopelessly misguided their hiring practices were). The prize? I got to take home an upgraded Mac 512k for a night, which I did by strapping it to my back with a couple of inner tubes (!), then bicycling from the De Anza campus to my home in San Jose. > >(If the mind-numbing stupidity of my treating a $1,000 computer (in 1980's dollars) in so cavalier a manner has you shaking your head, believe me, I find myself shaking my own whenever I think about what would have happened had those inner tubes not held.) @_@ > >-- >-- >----- >You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. >The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml >To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >To leave this group, send email to [email protected] >For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs > >Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ >--- >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vintage Macs" group. >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vintage Macs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vintage Macs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
