Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac From: info-mac@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.info-mac Subject: Hyperdrive Message-ID: <275@uw-beaver> Date: Fri, 21-Dec-84 14:40:09 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.275 Posted: Fri Dec 21 14:40:09 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 22-Dec-84 03:21:29 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 70 From: Paul R. JohnsonWe just had a demonstration of General Computer's HyperDrive here at MIT. They seem to have done a very good job. It is fast. You can boot off of it. It doesn't die if you try to eject it. You can copy a file to it from a floppy and copy it back without the file growing in size. It is organized into "file drawers" (i.e., virtual floppies) that can be mounted, unmounted, and created at anytime from a desk accessory. Thus you can be in the middle of MacPaint, say, and mount a file drawer without leaving the application. The drive itself is mounted inside on the back panel. There is a quiet (I couldn't hear it) variable speed fan that vents out one of the slanted collection of slots at the top back. They claim that a Macintosh with 512K and Hyperdrive runs cooler than a plain Fat Mac. The way you get one is that you take your Mac to a dealer where one of two things happens. Either the dealer ships your Mac off to General Computer for G.C. to make the modifications and ship it back ("One to two weeks."), or, if your dealer has an Apple Certified technician, the technician opens your Mac up, removes the digital board, and ships it to G.C. Once the board has been modified it is sent back with the disk, fan, and mounting hardware and the technician puts it all back together. G.C. expects that some dealers will try to keep some already modified boards (and other parts of the kit) in stock so the change can be made in the store in a hour or so. The modification involves unsoldering and removing the 68000 chip, attaching a daughter board in it's place, and putting the 68000 in a socket on the daughter board (I think I have that all correctly). An interesting side-effect of this is that G.C. can appearantly install even MORE memory ("A lot more") on the daughter board. The Macintosh memory usage (hardwired I/O addresses at the top of the 512K address space) makes it hard to use any extra memory in applications. But G.C. may come out with a product that provides more RAM that can be used for Disk cacheing or RAM disk. Back to HyperDrive. Included with the hardware is a bunch of software. Though you can use a vanilla Finder, they include a modified Finder that doesn't die if you try to copy a filedrawer into another filedrawer (it just tells you you can't instead). There is the desk accessory to create, mount, and unmount filedrawers. There is a Manager that does things like checking filedrawers, GCing them (to reclaim space from files that have been deleted), installing and changing passwords on filedrawers, etc. There is a Backup application that can do full or incremental backups of filedrawers, or explicitly chosen collections of files. And there is a Security application that can en/decrypt files using a modified DES algorithm. The latter is "twice as slow as copying the file" and replaces the clear/encrypted file with the corresponding encrpted/clear file with all modification times and other info preserved. Expected list prices are $2195 for just Hyperdrive, and $2795 for HyperDrive and memory expansion from 128K to 512K. First shipping is to be Jan 2. All in all it seemed to make a significant, qualitative change to the Mac. One rumor they passed on (they may not want to be quoted on this) is that Apple has ordered quite a few to evaluate the possibility of moving the Lisa Pascal Workshop over to a Fat Mac with HyperDrive! That's all I can think of to tell you. If anyone has any specific questions I'll try to answer them. ---Paul Johnson, M.I.T. Lab. for Computer Science -------