🚀 go-pugleaf

It can't hurt to run this information through again.  It's bound to be more
useful than talking about a 68030 Amiga -- I said talking, not having :-)
The new ROMs, in any Mac, minus, zero, or plus, will only format a disk as MFS
with an older System/Finder vintage (2/4 era.)  The 4K is "BTree" (directory)
space.  The 9K is the switch from K=1000 to K=1024.

Perhaps someone else knows about Switcher "running out of memory" on "upgraded"
512K Macs.  Does "upgrade" mean an old Mac with the ROM/800K drive, or 512E,
or both?  (I know, the answer is yes.)

> Pardon my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why initialized
> single sided disks, using the MacPlus with System 3.2 and Finder 5.3,
> show "4K in disk    387K free". As I remember, it used to be "0K in
> disk    399K free". I thought the single sided initialization created
> an MFS volume as before. Why, then, the missing 9K?

First, the old versions of the finder did not correctly calculate the
number of K free on a disk,  I don't remember the exact details, but I
believe it had to do with making 1K = 1000 bytes instead of 1024.
Second, the new finder has corrected this bug.  The 4K is probably from
the file, DeskTop, which is invisible.  The extra used space would be for
a directory map. 

> While I'm at it, here's another question for the cognoscenti:
> Why does Switcher 5.0 run out of memory when I try to open more than
> one application? This happens on the upgraded 512K Macs (you know, the
> in-between Mac). Before the upgrade, I could easily open say, MacDraw,
> Word and Finder. Anyone have the answer?

I haven't seen this happen.  Have you checked the information window to
show memory usage?   Some memory may be lost because it is being used by
the system heap.  Do you have the RAM cache turned on?  That would take
a healthy chunk away.   Hyperdrives will also cache 40K from you.

Steve Hawley
joevax!sdh

The way the Finder initially calculated disk space available was not a bug,
but a "feature" (some of you have heard this before!)  Steve Jobs said that
people wanted to see 400K available on blank disks, and that I should make
it so that was the case in the Finder.  Since the original single-sided
floppies held about 410,000 bytes, dividing by 1024 left exactly 400K;
subtracting a few K for the DeskTop file made it less than 400K free.
Dividing by 1000 instead of 1024 was basically a marketing decision, and an
apparently defendable one:  most naive users understood a K to be 1000, not
some power of two near 1000.

I imagine that Apple would have gotten more phone calls from naive users who
wanted to know why they didn't have 400K available on a disk than from
computer-sophisticates who wanted to know why the Finder was "wrong".
Debatable, to be sure.

On something entirely different:  given the latest version of LightspeedC,
why would anyone want to use MPW?  MacApp is the only reason I can think of,
but someday LSC will have support for objects.  (MacApp is a very nice
package, by the way, and I would probably be using it if I could.)  It seems
to me that MPW will never be able to be as fast as LSC, but that LSC could
well end up with all the features of MPW that you wanted (e.g. tight code
optimization, maybe as a compiler option, and support for the
object-oriented programming style).

-- 
Bruce Horn, Carnegie Mellon CSD
uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!cmu-cs-vlsi!blh
ARPA: blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu

In article <1013@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu> blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu (Bruce Horn) writes:

>On something entirely different:  given the latest version of LightspeedC,
>why would anyone want to use MPW? 

Why wouldn't anyone?  Chuck the compilers, and you're still left with
a shell with much more power than the Finder, and Rez/DeRez, which beats out
Rmaker easily for fine tuning your resource forks.

>Bruce Horn, Carnegie Mellon CSD
>uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!cmu-cs-vlsi!blh
>ARPA: blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu

					--Tom Lippincott
					..ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!fdot

"Those who understand will require no further explanation."
					--Saul Bellow
					..who doesn't use this computer at all