info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: Thomas De Bellis <Sy.SLogin%CU20B@COLUMBIA>
Dear John,
Thank you very much for letting me pester you with questions about
your Ram Disk driver. My problems in getting it running stemmed from
two different areas. The first was my incorrect use of FTP. I had
forgotten to set my logical byte size to 8. This made .RSRC files
become ASCIIfied and the Rmover would cause the MAC to crash when I
tried to do the copy to the clipboard. Great error diagnostics, huh?
The other problem was that we don't seem to have a program on our 20
that does what MACPUT does. That is, I couldn't find one. I tried
MODEM, but it never seemed to work no matter how many times I said
Recieve in MacTerminal. If I tried to Send to the 20, the Mac would
croak. This was with a version of MODEM that I anonymously got from
SUMEX ...
I gave up on that and tried to use our portable C compiler to
compile a version of MACPUT for the 20, but there appeared some
constructs there that PCC didn't like. Since I'm not really a C
hacker, that was a dead end also.
I finally did get it on the MAC, though. I correctly re-FTPed the
file to our 20. I then KERMIT'ed it over to a VAX running 4.2 that I
have an account on. The VAX has MACPUT on it and I used that to get
it on the Mac. Since I'm not really a Unix person, this was kind of
traumatic, but at least I have it now. The Rmover stuff was child's
play by comparison.
Well, having played with it for a few days, I can honestly say that
it is about the neatest thing that I have ever seen. This is really
what the Mac should have been. It blows away any hard disk that I
have ever seen for the Mac (the Dvong as the boot disk being about the
fastest that I can remember). MacWrite, usually a slow oink, flies on
it. It was nice to be able to try out lots of fonts and not have to
wait (a long time) for them to be read in.
MacPaint was a real surprise. Its fire up time was VERY
impressive. Moreover, when you get into MacPaint and stay there, you
can read new files in less than a second. Big MacPaint demo files
like the Japanese Woodcut positively explode onto the screen. Saving
files is just as fast. Nice.
However, there were (are) some disconcerting things that I found
that I thought I might throw out to INFO-MAC for general discussion
and solution:
1) Exiting an application is still kind of slow. The Finder bar pops
up and then you wait awhile before your desktop shows up. I
suspect that the Finder is spending all this time rebuilding your
desk top from a file. I hadn't thought that this was that CPU
intensive an activity. I can live with the 3 to 4 second fire up,
though.
2) If you have any kind of disk in the internal drive, it will always
spin on application termination and this slows you down a lot. If
said internal disk contains a desktop, that will become your
default desktop. It seems that the Finder checks the internal
drive first instead of the disk that it started up from. I'm
using an old Finder; does the new one with the funny landscape for
Finder info fix this? I couldn't find a disk that had a copy of
the new Finder to check.
3) Info about the RamDisk shows that it is on the AppleBus.
Interesting, I wonder how it got that? Perhaps if there was some
way to fool the system into thinking that the RamDisk was an
internal disk, you'd get the right desk top?
4) Although the RamDisk has 320K, it needs just a little more. Right
now, you can really only keep one document on it, it would be nice
to keep more. I understand that you leave 180K left over for the
Mac. I would rather leave 130K for the Mac and have a 382K Ram
disk. This would give the Mac what it always had: around 128K,
and give it what it always needed: a fast disk. I had always
thought that a 400K disk was kind of small, but at least I'm used
to working with it. I need just a little more space to have the
presentation go right. Can you change this or let me know how?
5) Sometimes MAC disks that booted just fine don't boot after I alter
the system file. Note, this only happens sometimes. I get that
little disk with the flashing X in the middle of it on the screen.
I havn't had ANY problems with trashed disks yet. If I don't feel
like waiting, I boot a non-altered system disk, and the eject it.
I insert the altered disk, which gets read in just fine
(*always*), and then double-click the Finder with command and
option held down. This always works and I then proceed to run
RAMSTART as if nothing ever happened. I should stress that
sometimes the altered disks boot up from scratch just fine.
5) Somebody here attempted to get a version of a RamDisk (I believe
it was Bill Croft's) working dynamically. The advantages are that
when you needed the RamDisk, you would just run this program and
ta da, a RamDisk. When you were done, you would just eject it
and throw it into the trash can. This could be done multiple
times and would allow you to get at the Fat Mac's extra memory
should you need it.
The program got its memory from the system segment which is
preserved across applications instead swiping it from the heap.
As of the last thing I heard, we only got a 4K disk working
because the pointer or allocation counter to the system segment
wouldn't handle as much memory as we wanted to use. Got any ideas
of how to get around that?
6) I had heard of somebody doing a MACPUT for the 20. Did that ever
get done? If not, if anyone has some suggestions on how to get
MACPUT to compile with the portable C compiler, I'd like to take a
crack. Our KERMIT isn't quite ready yet and I don't have an
ARPAnet id on a Unix system so I'd really like to get something
going on the 20.
All in all, a breath of fresh air for the Mac. I'm sure that I'm
going to blow away the intellectuals in my Spanish class with a
presentation about a computer doing foreign languages. Thanks again!
-- Tom
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