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From: dennisg@fritz.UUCP (Dennis Griesser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Should 64K ROMs be supported?
Message-ID: <2982@fritz.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Jan-87 21:06:54 EST
Article-I.D.: fritz.2982
Posted: Thu Jan  8 21:06:54 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Jan-87 04:37:52 EST
References: <476@runx.OZ> <1490@hoptoad.uucp> <907@ur-tut.UUCP>
Sender: root@fritz.UUCP
Reply-To: dennisg@fritz.UUCP (Dennis Griesser)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
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In article <1629@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>While staying very firmly on the side of supporting the old ROMs, I'd like
>to say that I wish very much it were not so.  There are simply too many
>configuration options now, two large dimensions of choice.  When doing file
>operations, you have to ask, first, is this machine running HFS or MFS?
>Then you have to ask, is this volume that I'm working on an HFS or an MFS
>volume?  Finally, you have to ask whether this machine has old or new ROMs
>(an old ROM machine could be running RAM-based HFS, after all.)  Yeccchh!

The really sad thing about the whole affair is "why should it matter?"

I have never liked machines with vast amounts of software locked away
in ROMs.  The only reason I overcame this aversion with the Mac was because
of the effort that Apple expended to make it patchable.

In the best of all possible worlds, a Mac would never become obsolete.
  Don't have new ROMs with list manager?  Get a fresh PACK resource.
  Nasty serial driver in ROM?  Use a RAM one instead.
  Want HFS?  Add HD-20.
All of this should be invisible to the application.

A Mac owner would never be forced to upgrade, but might have to keep adding
things to his boot disk to keep up to date.  Even the thriftiest Mac owner
might go for new ROMs when his system folder started taking up his whole
boot disk!

>I would like to see Apple declare MFS and MFS volumes obsolete and do a real
>upgrade of the operating system, one where you can do things the right way
>without having to include the wrong way in a special case.  The MFS disk
>format could still be supported, with some overhead for interpreting its
>DeskTop-resource folders as HFS directories.

Sounds neat.  Just make sure that I don't have to toss all of my MFS disks
out!