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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. Johnson 

We 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
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