info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (08/25/84)
From: Randy Forgaard <RANDY@MIT-XX.ARPA> Some tidbits of news heard at tonight's meeting of the technical subgroup of the Macintosh group of the Boston Computer Society: 1) Softalk when into involuntary bankruptcy yesterday...ST.Mac is probably gone for good (!). 2) MacTerminal 1.0 is now being duplicated, and will be shipped to dealers next week. 3) Think Technologies sent the real first release of MacPascal to Apple last week, and it should reach dealer shelves in 6 weeks (oh, well). 4) New hard disk for the Mac has been announced (available?) from Symbiotic. It is currently the only hard disk drive to use the external drive port rather than one of the RS-422 ports. (May have a poor data transfer rate.) 5) Softech Microsystems is working on UCSD Pascal and Fortran to run stand-alone on the Mac. 6) If you are using a Memorex disk, and the disk gets trashed due to media problems (presumably it would be one of the older Memorex disks with "rough edges"...see previous INFO-MAC messages), the usual disk-recovery-by- rebuilding-the-directory methods probably won't work, because the problem is in the media. Make a DiskCopy of the disk first, throw away the original disk, and use the recovery schemes on the copy of the disk. 7) The Lisa format disks supplied with the Mac Software Supplement can be duplicated on the Mac itself. Use the Oct. 19 version of the disk utility program. 8) Making 512K Macs is easy, and many places have done it. All that is needed are the 256K RAMs and a multiplexer (no PALs, etc.). (A public service announcement only...I have no details.) 9) Rumor: A few color Macs have been rigged up in some form, and LucasFilm may have one of them. -- Randy Forgaard -------