fiddler%concertina@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) (11/16/89)
In article <1989Nov7.005724.7833@iisat.uucp>, mackay@iisat.uucp (Daniel MacKay) writes: > This has been bothering me ever since I got the Unidisk //c ROM upgrade- > that mysterious "Appletalk Offline" message when you PR#7. I checked > [...] > While this code running around in the firmware of my machine doesn't > actually bother me, I do sort of wonder why anyone- specifically, > "Fern Bachman", say the assembly listings- would have gone through > the trouble of writing all 963 lines for a machine with no Appletalk > hardware support. Well, Rich Williams wrote a lot of the updated //c code, along with Fern. > Anyone know why this code was put there, and why it was never finished > or hooked up? I suspect that it was done because it was easy to do (Rich had done some work on the Mac's AppleTalk code), and if the code was in the ROM, it would have been much easier to talk management into implementing full AT support in later versions of the //c. I talked with Rich about this when I upgraded the manual to reflect the various fixes that went into the //c at the time. He didn't come right out and say that that was why the code had gone in, but the implication was there. At the time it didn't seem important. (Apple had just spasmed, severing 1200 employees, and I was there only to finish up the manual so it wouldn't hold up shipping the fixes or the new //c. My wife won't talk about the period to this day, and my daughters remember it as the time they emptied their penny banks and gave me all they had saved up.) ------------ "...I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization." - Petronius Arbiter