🚀 go-pugleaf

I'd just thought I'd let people know that we have been using an AppleTalk
network for our systems design/data structures class. Students program with
TML Pascal, a two disk system. The way we have arranged things, our
Macintoshes live on the network with an XL/Serve disk server and a
LaserWriter. Students use a "special" disk to boot the Macintosh, then
connect to a shared (locked) class disk on the disk server that contains a
system, finder, Pascal compiler, and other system software. They eject the
special boot disk, option-double-click the finder on the class disk, and
they are now running diskless using a system disk with about 1M of "useful"
programs.  The students' programs live on the students' private disks which
are placed in the internal drive. Students can print MacWrite documents from
the diskless system as well. However, to edit a MacWrite document, paint a
MacPaint document or print an Edit document requires a disk that can be
written to. Therefore we have 5 tiny private disks on the disk server
containing Edit and MacPaint which students can "check out" for
printing/editing and then return to the server when done. We assume that
they have their own MacWrite disks for editing and do not need our system at
all. We're living with three problems: 1) XL/Serve is slightly slower than
Sony drivers (we're running with a large cache on XL/Serve and seem to be
running nearly completely out of the Lisa cache); 2) It is inconvenient to
boot/setup, especially when a program bombs or gets into an infinite loop
(students now routinely call InitDialog with a procedure that exits to shell
instead of forcing the reboot); 3) MacPaint does not like the LaserWriter or
XL/Serve. If one tries to just "Print" from the finder, MacPaint does not
use draft mode, which the LaserWriter wants; if one opens a MacPaint
document, prints it, closes it, and opens another, MacPaint dies (bomb ID =
2). If anyone has a better way, we'd like to hear about it, but this is how
we dealt with the problem of providing everyone a second disk drive, plenty
of systems software and access to a LaserWriter.