pbaker@vertigo.UUCP (Peter Baker) (01/20/86)
[for the line eater]
I have two questions to those in netland.
1 - What has happened to MultiMac? There was a small roar on
the net for a week or so ... and then nothing.
I have used it on a 512k mac with an external floppy and WOW!
It is definitely better than sliced bread. The problem is
that it doesn't seem to work with any hard disks (other than
the SCSI mod). The local theory is that the system heap is
not big enough for my MacBottom drivers AND MultiMac (29K
which lives in the system heap). [yes, I've tried making the
heap bigger, but the mac bombs if it is larger than 60k].
Note: the suggested reason for MultiMac working with the
SCSI mod. is that J. Bass's driver is very small (and thus
uses very little of the system heap).
2 - Do the new ROMs from Apple allow you to set a larger system
heap? If so, has anybody tried the new ROMs with MultiMac
and a hard disk?
PLEASE!!! Somebody come to my rescue. After having used MultiMac
I'm almost ready to give up my MacBottom [ALMOST, I
said].
Thanks in advance
... Peter Baker
<...!ubc-vision!vertigo!pbaker>olson@harvard.UUCP (Eric Olson) (01/22/86)
From my examination of MultiMac, I believe it doesn't work on hard disks because a large part of it is a disk cacher. If it is designed to supplant the Sony driver, it would not work on any disk not using the Sony driver (i.e., anything but a floppy). An old version of Multimac consisted primarily of a DRVR named ".Diskbuffer", so I suspect it grew out of a much simpler disk driver into a multitasker. Later versions of it don't have the DRVR in a DRVR resource, but still look pretty much the same inside. Don't ask me where I got these (Offa some bulletin board), they were beta and didn't work right all the time... but what supprised me was how seldom it actually crashed! None of the ones I've seen worked on a Hyperdrive or a Lisa running Macworks. I heard a rumor that they had given up on developing this, but 1) Its pretty neat and 2) It would be a pity to quit now I also heard that Andy Hertzfeld might do a multitasker, and I certainly wouldn't put it past him. -Eric.
brad@gcc-milo.ARPA (Brad Parker) (01/23/86)
In article <638@harvard.UUCP> olson@harvard.UUCP (Eric olson) writes: >From my examination of MultiMac, I believe it doesn't work on hard disks >because a large part of it is a disk cacher. If it is designed to supplant >the Sony driver, it would not work on any disk not using the Sony driver... >... None of the ones I've seen worked on a Hyperdrive >-Eric. Not entirely true. It doesn't work on HyperDrive's because it's a 28K driver. There simply isn't enough room in the system heap. If you expand the system heap on a HyperDrive 10 by 20K, it works fine. (removing the print spooler is recommended). I can supply more detailed information to those who want it. -- J Bradford Parker seismo!harvard!gcc-milo!brad "I want to go up to Detroit I want to lie in the shade I want to visit the President And then I want to get laid" - O.M.D. "Bloc Bloc Bloc"
bmug@well.UUCP (01/24/86)
In article <135@vertigo.UUCP> pbaker@vertigo.UUCP (Peter Baker) writes: >[for the line eater] > >I have two questions to those in netland. > > 1 - What has happened to MultiMac? There was a small roar on > the net for a week or so ... and then nothing. > According to Andy Hertzfeld at the Expo in SF, MultiMac is pretty much dead and will never be released as a finished product. Andy had spoken to the programmer of MultiMac and (I assume) seen some of the code, and reported that the author had pretty much programmed himself into a corner. The author made too many assumptions about the behavior of other programs, called ROM directly, and many other no-no's. The latest report was that the author of MultiMac was writing accounting software for a bank in Holland or something like that. All hope should not be lost however, Andy is working on a new program he calls "Servant" which will replace the finder and switcher, and which behaves a lot like MultiMac. He showed it to a few people at the show, but wouldn't show or talk about it publicly yet. I saw it run, and my reaction was similar to when I first saw Switcher run. Jaw hitting the floor, head shaking in amazement, how could I get a copy?, why can't I write applications like this?, etc... I have to admit that I saw it run on the Levco 68020/68081 16Mhz machine with 4Megs of memory and an internal 20meg hard disk which I'm sure added to my amazement level, but what the program did and not the speed at which it ran was the impressive thing. I'll try and figure out a good way to adequately describe what I saw of "Servant" and post it to the net in a few days. Fred A. Huxham still amazed
tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) (01/24/86)
In article <638@harvard.UUCP> olson@harvard.UUCP (Eric olson) writes: > >I also heard that Andy Hertzfeld might do a multitasker, and I certainly >wouldn't put it past him. > It appears that this is true. Someone who was at the recent show in San Francisco posted a note to compuserve about this. They had seen it run. It works with hard disks ( in fact, it was run on the Hyper 20 on the Mac of the guy posting the note ). From his discription, it sounds like a cross between the Finder, Multimac, a print spooler, and a terminal emulator. That is, he mentioned that it drew the desktop of his startup drawer much faster than the Finder does, and that it has support for spooling and {up,down}load. The most interesting part was the robustness of it. Sometimes it would bomb, and Hertzfeld would smile, press a few keys, and the bombed application was gone, leaving everything else still running! I want one... -- Tim Smith sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim