scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) (07/20/87)
In article <2120@cbmvax.UUCP> grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) writes: >rather than the little nibs on the A1000 keybard. Actually, it is something >of a mystery why some A1000's were manufactured with the nibs on the d and k >keytops, while other have them on f and j. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this Mac+ sitting here next to me has "nibs" on the "D" and "K" keys. Maybe the keyboard people were just trying to be Mac compatible? ;-) And why do I have a Mac here? I just did a "scottdisk.device" for the Mac (A friend of mine wanted to use this spare drive he had lying around...) This was the first serious Mac-Hacking I'd done in several years. It was interesting to compare what I had to go through to do a Mac driver vs what I had to go through to do an Amiga driver. 1. Go to Walden Books and buy the "Inside Macintosh" books. (The ones I had were hopelessly out-of-date) 2. Read the sections on SCSI manager, device manager, and disk driver. 3. Write the driver. This is contrasted with: 1. Have the RKM etc for the Amiga. 2. Pay $900 to buy a diskette, SCSI host adapter, and OMTI 5100 SCSI controller. (I used winnies I had laying around and an IBM PC power supply to make it all go.) 3. Read the RKM till I was blue in the face and STILL not have a clear idea of how to do a disk driver. 4. Take the parallel.device apart to figure out how a device driver REALLY worked. 5. Take apart the MF driver to decode how the host adapter worked. 6. Write the new driver. Also, disk editor programs for the Mac worked out-of-the-box with my driver. I'm still waiting for a good visual disk editor to use with scottdisk.device... Time-wise it took me 3 days to get the Mac up. I'd wince real heavily if I estimated how many hours I spent to get to scottdisk.device. I'm wincing real hard right now over the fact that this silly 398 byte driver for the Mac KICKS the tail of my Amiga performance wise, sigh. Really pissed me off when my Mac driver starting getting multi-block I/O requests while my Amiga driver sat there yelling "SET ME FREE! I CAN READ MORE THAN ONE BLOCK AT A TIME!!!" Gads, I think I'm almost going to be sad to see this Mac go. :( But then I remember Excalibur and Arthur, chuckle, and say "Well it can read multiple blocks, but it can't run multiple programs!" Scott Turner -- UUCP-stick: stride!l5comp!scotty | If you want to injure my goldfish just make UUCP-auto: scotty@l5comp.UUCP | sure I don't run up a vet bill. GEnie: JST | "The bombs drop in 5 minutes" R. Reagan Disclaimer? I own L5 Computing. Isn't that enough?