jack@cca.CCA.COM (Jack Orenstein) (08/04/87)
What should I do the next time I have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket? That will buy either a 20 meg hard disk or 4 meg extra ram. (I've heard prices of $500 for 2 meg, and I extrapolated. If this isn't right, someone please correct me.) Would I, with 4 meg, be able to keep Manx C with utilities and selected libraries, linker, editor, and a bunch of CLI commands in ram? (I have just started exploring Manx C and don't yet have a feel for these numbers.) What would that leave for sources, object modules and binaries? (I almost never work on programs with fewer than about ten modules.) After repeated edit/compile/run cycles, will fragmentation of memory become a problem? Assuming this is all feasible, what are opinions as to the wisdom of proceeding in this way? Jack Orenstein
mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) (08/05/87)
In article <18611@cca.CCA.COM> jack@cca.CCA.COM (Jack Orenstein) writes:
<Would I, with 4 meg, be able to keep Manx C with utilities and selected
<libraries, linker, editor, and a bunch of CLI commands in ram?
With 4 meg of FAST mem, I can keep c:, system:, my entire Manx
development environment, my entire Lattice development environment,
sources and binaries (both Manx and Lattice) to my latest project -
including the Mac and Unix versions for reference - a running vt100, a
running mg2a-alpha with a couple of hundred K of sources in buffers,
and a fullscreen console window - all on an interlaced, morerowed
screen. Plus the usual half-dozen background goodies.
4 Meg is a *lot* of room for C development. About the only time I run
out of room is when I'm running a couple of copies of LISP, or have
something large loaded. Normally I only keep one C development
environment loaded, and still have 2.5Meg of free FAST ram. It's nice
to be able to "backup" a disk by copying it to vdk: for testing :-).
<Assuming this is all feasible, what are opinions as to the wisdom of
<proceeding in this way?
BUY A RACK! BUY A RACK! Memory expansions + hard disk controllers seem to
create problems when you get them to work together. I've encountered
at least one hard disk manufacturer that didn't know that their
software didn't work in FAST ram.
Actually, 2 Meg is plenty for a C development environment - I added
the extra 2 when I started fooling with LISP. 1 meg may be enough, but
I've never tried it. Given that, and an extra $500, the PAL Jr. looks
like a nice box. 20 Meg HD, 1 Meg of $C00000 (which buys you back some
chip ram, which is a *good* thing. I may go to a WCS replacement for
that), real-time clock and a slot for their 2-8 Meg board. Which they
want to much for if you don't buy it with the Pal Jr.
The ASDG mini rack + an ASDG ram board fits the budget, but ASDG
doesn't have a disk controller (yet). And I think you can only get 2
meg at the price. I'd be tempted by it if I were in your shoes. (Hmm -
thinking about it, I may switch to that anyway. When is your disk
controller do out, Perry?)
I've also got some literature from for a thing called the FIP. Very
similar to the Pal, but without the $C00000 memory and extra goodies.
Also without an extra $500 in the price.
<mike
--
Round about, round about, in a fair ring-a. Mike Meyer
Thus we dance, thus we dance, and thus we sing-a. mwm@berkeley.edu
Trip and go, to and fro, over this green-a. ucbvax!mwm
All about, in and out, over this green-a. mwm@ucbjade.BITNETali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) (08/05/87)
In article <18611@cca.CCA.COM> jack@cca.CCA.COM (Jack Orenstein) writes: >What should I do the next time I have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket? >That will buy either a 20 meg hard disk or 4 meg extra ram. (I've heard >prices of $500 for 2 meg, and I extrapolated. If this isn't right, >someone please correct me.) 2 Meg Ram boards can just be parasites and feed off the Amiga. 4 Meg boards, on the other hand, are better off with their own power supplies, and thus a bigger external unit. But in any case I think your extimate of $1000 is probably right... Actually you could probably create a wonderful Manx environment with just (just? JUST?) a 2 Meg expansion --- Especially if you invest in ASDG's Facc, the floppy cache. ($35 list, and well worth it.) With 512K worth of buffers, you can just keep all your sources on disk instead of ram: or vd0:. You can also precompile all the library files into a huge file and thus avoid the need of bringing in all the library files into ram:. With various commands and cc, emacs, ln, as, and make in vd0:, object files and final executable in ram:, and source files on disk (but cached with facc), you still work with about 1 - 1.5 Meg free and everything is real fast (and the only disk access occurs when you make changes to a source and write it out. This is a good thing! 8-) ) Of course, with facc you might wonder why not keep cc, ln, etc on disk as well and just let facc cache them up. This works fine, except when I crash the machine --- In vd0: they still survive and I avoid the reload times. Also, because facc invalidates the cache on disk eject, and because I have only 2 drives, this way I can use the internal drive to look at other disks without decaching my sources and such. Sometimes I notice I'm down to 512K and start to panic. Then I notice in my Emacs buffers I am keeping the various autodoc files (all pretty huge), various include files, and almost all my sources. Remember the Commodore with 7167 bytes free? Sometimes I would have 25 bytes left free when my program is running and would go crazy trying to figure out what extra feature to add on... Anyway, what's the final point? For $500 get a 2 Meg board, and find another $250 and for $750 get a 20 Meg Supra drive (that is the mail order price...). That way you have both! Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.s/71 - WhRe
eric@hippo.UUCP (Eric Bergan) (08/06/87)
In article <4597@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) writes: > > Actually, 2 Meg is plenty for a C development environment - I added > the extra 2 when I started fooling with LISP. 1 meg may be enough, but > I've never tried it. Given that, and an extra $500, the PAL Jr. looks > like a nice box. 20 Meg HD, 1 Meg of $C00000 (which buys you back some > chip ram, which is a *good* thing. I may go to a WCS replacement for > that), real-time clock and a slot for their 2-8 Meg board. Which they > want to much for if you don't buy it with the Pal Jr. At the most recent FAUG meeting, a representative from Byte-by-Byte announced that they are ceasing production of both the Pal and the Pal Jr. units. They will continue to supply spare parts, etc., but said that it was not economically feasible to keep producing the units. One reason he gave was simply that they have not sold that well (possibly because they weren't shipping?) I also imagine the marketplace will be substantially different with a CBM produced controller for the 2000. -- eric ...!ptsfa!hippo!eric
perry@atux01.UUCP (Perry S. Kivolowitz) (08/07/87)
In article <4597@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) writes: > (discussion about four meg being enough) Four meg is exactly what I use. I keep about two megabytes of VD0: which is enough to hold the entire C development environment as well as nearly every programming tool worth having. As well as the source to three or four projects that I might be working on. As well as a few spreadsheets. Then, I throw 512 buffers at FaccII from my startup-sequence. This con- only another 256K. So, with everything I could possibley need in VD0: AND a comfortable a- mount of FaccII space I still have about two megabytes to spare for pro- gram execution. In my view, four meg is the ``minimum dream'' configuration. At eight megabytes the extra space can be turned into a really effective mass storage device. But at four, you can already configure a working envi- ronment on an Amiga which gives serious competition to a single user VAX 11/780. That's what VD0:, four meg of ram, and Facc buy you. An ef- fective working environment on your Amiga. There is very little I could do better or faster on a single user VAX. (speaking completely objec- tively as a computing professional, I love my Amiga (with the added goodies)). I might also add that more memory will increase the level of multipro- gramming which a disk drive cannot do. Also, enough ram (and a recover- able ram disk) will make the need for a disk less urgent (until of course your needs outgrow your ram again). > BUY A RACK! BUY A RACK! Here. Here. > The ASDG mini rack + an ASDG ram board fits the budget, but ASDG > doesn't have a disk controller (yet). And I think you can only get 2 > meg at the price. I'd be tempted by it if I were in your shoes. (Hmm - > thinking about it, I may switch to that anyway. When is your disk > controller do out, Perry?) > Let's see. The budget was $1000 for four meg? Well, a 2M plus a mini-rack-c is $599. A second 2M (making four megabytes) would be $499. That gets us within $100 of the target price. But then, you'd be taking up both slots of the Mini-Rack so when you want to upgrade to the SDP (satellite disk pro- cessor) you'd also have to upgrade racks. ummm. Another approach is to get an 8M/2 for 899 also including the Mini-Rack-C. This would be 899. But, then you could later put as much as 8 megabytes on the single memory board leaving the second slot available for the SDP. The SPD will be out in small quantities in September. More available as time marches forever onward. Perry By the way, Mike. I now read your messages even if the topic is completely uninteresting to me just to see what you have as your signature. A) where do you get this stuff. B) have you ever repeated any one signature more than once?