len@qumix.UUCP (Leonard Labar) (04/10/85)
Awhile back I posted news to the net expressing my concern that we were getting carried away with the idea that "fat mac" was the only way to go. Here are some of the responses (condensed for your viewing). As usual these views are not those of my employer. No info is yet available on the reliability of the power supply after the conversion. Some stories have been heard about a few that have died. Quantitative data would be helpful. Apple is putting the finder into ROM. That should help tremendously assuming they listen to the net. By the way Apple is pushing for the fat mac. A company in Texas does an external video jack conversion for $200. If the information was available hardware hackers could probably do the conversions themselves for $5. Apparently a 2nd drive overcomes a lot of the limitations (my vote is still for waiting until a reasonably priced internal hard disk is available ..of course this maybe impies more RAM too). Hayden has an integrated package available for 128k but it doesn't have telecommunications built int. Getting the "hardware hackers to speed up the 400K internal drive" would be essential. For any significant application to run confortably in 128K, it would have to make heavy use of the disk, and those little Sony's are an astounding bottleneck. Rascal is a single application, which combines and Editor, Linker, Compiler, and Exector (each of these is a window). Rascal is an I/O intensive language, supports all toolbox routines, has a very zippy compiler. So, if you have a 128K mac, and want to do some hacking, Rascal is a great way to go. Metaresearch, Inc. 1100 SE Woodward Portland, OR 97202 (503) 232-1712