mort@ihuxn.UUCP (Dubman) (02/05/84)
During the development of the Macintosh I was in contact (through a friend) with some people at Apple, and I have been long awaiting its arrival. I fooled around with this amazing machine-on-two-boards in a local computer store and it blew me away. A man with a little kid came into the store, asked me and my friend about ten questions, played with the computer for five minutes, bought one, and walzed out the door. Anyway, I read the Feb issues of Byte and Softalk and they provide a wealth of interesting information that I haven't seet on the net... > The 3 1/2 inch disk drive stores its 400K in an interesting manner: Unlike the Hewlett Packard drive, which stores 270K in 70 tracks with equal amounts of data on each track, the Macintosh drive uses 80 tracks with MORE DATA ON THE OUTER TRACKS. This is possible using software controlled disk speed. > Mind you the disk that the Mac uses is only single-sided. It may be possible to use a double-sided drive that would store 800K. Apple may be planning on this. > The 64K of ROM contains lots o' good stuff for programmers: To sum them up from BYTE...: Resource Manager, Font Manager, Quickdraw, Event Manager, Toolbox Utilities, Window Manager, Control Manager, Menu Manager, Text Edit, Dialog Manager, and Desk Manager. Sorry if that's not too descrip- tive but there are so many routines in each... What is basically means is a standard for future programs, and smaller programs that don't take up precious RAM space (128 K of it) for screen/memory/mouse, etc. routines. > Graphics are 512x342 pixels, and there's gonna be a laser printer that will print in color. > Software soon to come: Pascal, Assembler/Debugger, BASIC, Logo, and LOTS of stuff from other companies. I know that the Zork adventures are coming from Infocom, and other games, not to mention business programs. More stuff in: "More Mac Bits" -- Jonathan Dubman - care of: Mort Dubman AT&T Bell Laboratories ihnp4!ihuxn!mort Naperville, IL.