info-mac@uw-beaver (02/06/85)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) Thanks for the comments, Thomas. Let me just clarify two things about what I said. About the long time the Lisa takes to boot, you said: With LisaBug installed, MacIntosh software boots (at least) as fast on the Lisa as it does on the Mac. LisaBug also has the advantage that it can trap illegal memory references, that it has a built-in assembler, and that it uses a full screen for the debugger display. You seem to be talking about the time to launch a Mac application. I meant the time to boot, to go from power off to doing something useful. That is what you have to do when the still buggy program you're developing crashes, isn't it? Or does LisaBug allow you to recover from some crashes? Another thing is that the Lisa spends a long time checking its hard disk when it boots. Your Lisa doesn't have a hard disk and may come up much faster for that reason. Anyway, on a Lisa with a hard disk I've seen that the time to go from power off to editing a program is around 4 minutes. You also said: The MacIntosh XL upgrade does (will?) include a version of MacWorks that can be put onto the 2/10 harddisk and that boots from there. So far, Apple has only gotten the number of floppies needed down to 1, not 0. It used to be 2. You used to have to boot MacWorks and then insert a Mac floppy with a system file and Finder to bring the system up all the way. Now, all you need is a MacWorks floppy and after that the Lisa will read in the system file and Finder from the hard disk. Does anyone know if there's a way to stop the new MacWorks from reading the system and Finder from the hard disk? I have the Manx shell on the hard disk and set it to be the startup application. I also moved the Finder to bin/Finder. Now when I try to boot MacWorks, it looks on the hard disk and says "can't find finder." I don't know how to get it to boot from a floppy so I can try to restore the hard disk for it. I'll have to use an older version of MacWorks if the current one cannot be induced to boot from a Mac floppy. Since you can have a Lisa 2/10 and a 128K Mac for the price of a Hyperdrive, you might be able to make a good development system if you only compile things on the Lisa and run them on the Mac. That would prevent the Lisa from crashing and avoid the very long boot time. You could also use a few hundred K ramdisk on the Lisa to compensate for its slow hard disk. I'd love to try this out, but problems like the one above keep on coming up.