disks, etc.

[Info-Mac]

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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: disks, etc.
Message-ID:
Date: Tue, 3-Jul-84 07:33:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1040
Posted: Tue Jul 3 07:33:28 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jul-84 03:32:44 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Jerry E. Pournelle
We have extra floppy drive dor Mac. It is large (about as big
as a thinline 5" would be), heavy, full of CMOS (judging from
the heavy warnings about not plugging it in unless you have
grounded yourself) and on a SHORT cable making it difficult to
put it on top of the mac.
It works pretty good, except that it is like CP/M 1.4
was: you MUST have a system disk in the main drive, and WORSE,
it MUST be the syst em disk you BOOTED WITH for many
applications. This is going to play hell with Softloc copy
protected disks. Copying FILES is fun and easy, using icons;
making a disk copy requires that half-way through you instert
the original system disk for reasons I do not understand. In
general MacWrite and MacPaint know about the extra disk.
However, if your extra disk has a version of Macwrite with fonts
not on your original system disk, you apparently can't get at
them; you have to do incredible contortions; it's easier to
transfer the fonts to the original system disk, alas, that fills
it up...
In other words, the second disk software is pretty good
in conception, and sometimes elegant in execution, but then one
hits the stupid errors that seem to spoil the fun on darned near
all available Mac software. SIGH.