BMUG PD-ROM B4/PD-ROM B4.iso/Utilities/TidBITs/TidBITS 101-125/TidBITS#106⁄10-Feb-92.etx

Text File | 1992-05-27 | 31KB | 630 lines

TidBITS#106/10-Feb-92
=====================

 Infojunkies rejoice! As a controversial first, Sterling
   Software is putting all of Usenet on CD-ROM every month. Less
   controversial was our discussion with members of the HyperCard
   team, providing insights into HyperCard's present and future.
   Also, a review of the excellent "The PC is not a typewriter,"
   your last chance to turn in that System 7 coupon, a more
   detailed explanation of video memory, and a better way to
   rebuild the desktop.

 Copyright 1990-1992 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
   publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Other
   publications please contact us. We do not guarantee the accuracy
   of articles. Publication, product, and company names may be
   registered trademarks of their companies. Disk subscriptions and
   back issues are available.

 For more information send electronic mail to [e-mail] or
 Internet: [e-mail] -- CIS: 72511,306 -- AOL: Adam Engst
 TidBITS -- 9301 Avondale Rd. NE Q1096 -- Redmond, WA 98052 USA
 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Topics:
    MailBITS/10-Feb-92
    System 7 Coupon
    HyperCard Confabulation
    Usenet on a CD-ROM, no longer a fable
    The PC is not a typewriter
    More on Video Memory
    Reviews/10-Feb-92

[Archived as /info-mac/digest/tb/tidbits-106.etx; 31K]


MailBITS/10-Feb-92
------------------
  The mailing list at SFU continues to suffer strange problems, and
  although we've worked some of them out with the help of the
  administrators there, it seems that some of you haven't received
  TidBITS#105, which I sent out last week. If that is the case, my
  sincere apologies. We considered sending it out again but decided
  that most people probably had it and would not appreciate another
  copy. The bugs continue to die, and to help with the heavy load
  we're going to set up a LISTSERV as well. I'll post information on
  how to subscribe to TidBITS there once everything is finalized. In
  the meantime, those of you who missed TidBITS#105 can easily
  request it via email from <[e-mail]>. Just send
  email to that address and put this line in the _body_ of the
  mailfile.

    $MAC GET tidbits-105.etx

  Alternately, you may be able to use FTP to get the file /info-
  mac/digest/tb/tidbits-105.etx from <sumex-aim.stanford.edu> or as
  a posting in the Usenet group comp.sys.mac.digest, whichever is
  easiest.


Desktop Construction
  Dale Southard writes "As a longtime TidBITS reader: THANKS! To the
  point, you mentioned rebuilding the desktop as a fix for the "lost
  folder bug." I don't know about the bug, but there is an easier
  way to rebuild the desktop:

* Quit all apps but the Finder.
* Hit command-option-esc to force quit the Finder.
* Click on the "Force Quit" button and then immediately depress
  and hold command-option.

  When the Finder restarts, it will give you the option of
  rebuilding all mounted disks. I think it's much more convenient
  than restarting as we used to have to do."

  [Adam: We've received information indicating that rebuilding the
  desktop and using some of the fixes we mentioned last issue may
  not work in some cases. As we mentioned, it still looks like the
  only fix guaranteed to work is to reformat the hard drive and
  restore from your up-to-date backup. More on this when we know.]

  Information from:
    Dale Southard -- [e-mail]
    Henning Pape-Santos -- [e-mail]


SoftAT Mistake
  Mark H. Anbinder corrects our mistake in our recent article about
  SoftPC. "SoftAT is _not_ an add-on product that's to be added to
  Universal SoftPC, the way the EGA/AT Option Module needed to be
  added to an existing copy of SoftPC. SoftAT is a stand-alone
  product."

  Information from:
    Mark H. Anbinder -- [e-mail]


System 7 Coupon
---------------
  Mark H. Anbinder writes, "The System 7 coupon program, which
  allowed Mac purchasers to send in a special coupon to receive a
  free System 7 kit, expired on 31-Dec-91, but Apple has extended it
  to cover Macs purchased through 02-Feb-92 (presumably because
  that's when the Right Now Rebate promotion ended). If you have one
  of those coupons sitting around and haven't yet sent it in, now is
  the time! Your coupon must be postmarked by Friday, 14-Feb-92, so
  better get it in the mail right away."

  Information from:
    Mark H. Anbinder -- [e-mail]


HyperCard Confabulation
-----------------------
  I appear to have opened an intellectual can of worms in
  TidBITS#102 with my comparison of HyperCard and QuickTime and my
  statement that HyperCard was, in some respects, a commercial
  failure. That article provoked an extremely interesting and
  enlightening discussion with Kevin Calhoun, who was Apple's lead
  engineer for HyperCard 2.0 and 2.1, and with Mike Holm, who has
  been the HyperCard Product Manager since 1987.

  I have received several other lengthy editorials on the subject of
  HyperCard and its success, and I'm pleased to announce that we
  will be putting together a special HyperCard retrospective issue
  to be released this summer when HyperCard celebrates its fifth
  birthday. That issue will explore what HyperCard truly is, where
  it has come from, where it is going, how it has succeeded and how
  it has failed, and in the same way that HyperCard itself has
  appealed to numerous different types of people, the issue will
  feature opinions from the famous and the not-yet-famous alike.
  However, you'll have to wait until this summer for that issue, and
  Kevin asked that I publish his reply to my controversial
  statements right away since he feels HyperCard is just starting to
  come into its own now.

Kevin Calhoun writes...
  In TidBITS #102, you write that Voyager's Expanded Books are "one
  of the few commercial programs to use HyperCard." In my view, this
  is the kind of observation that can only be made by a person who's
  not paying attention! Let me point out some products that you've
  so far failed to notice.

  ABC News Interactive offers more than half a dozen interactive
  videodiscs titles with HyperCard-based software. Warner New Media
  now has four titles in their series of Audio Notes, with the
  latest, "The Orchestra," released just last week. There are
  thirteen titles in Voyager's Video Companion series, four in their
  CD Companion Series, and three in their brand new series of
  Expanded Books. Stackware offerings are the cream of the crop
  among the CD-ROM products for Macintosh, with titles such as
  "Exotic Japan," "Baseball's Greatest Hits," "Anatomist," "Cosmic
  Osmo," and "The Manhole", in addition to the various series of
  CD-ROM offerings I've already mentioned.

  Momentum behind these products appears to be building. Over the
  last six months, Voyager has released 14 new products; 11 of them
  are based on HyperCard. At the Macworld Exposition recently held
  in San Francisco, they sold out of their complete stock of two of
  their Expanded Books, 1000 copies of each in less than four days.
  They already have plans for dozens of additional titles for the
  series.

  The biggest names in the industry - Microsoft, Claris, Lotus, and
  Apple - all provide online help in the form of HyperCard stacks.
  Yes, that's right: Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3 Macintosh,
  ClarisWorks, and Apple System Software 7, among others, are all
  products that use HyperCard.

  And, of course, there are the dozens and dozens of high-quality
  non-commercial stacks that have been developed by university
  professors, corporate training departments, hobbyists, etc., and
  that cover a remarkably broad range of topics, from vegetarian
  recipes to Renault auto parts.

  Most of the earliest software that includes QuickTime-based
  content has been developed in HyperCard, including "Baseball's
  Greatest Hits" and Apple's own "Apple Intro News." And by the way,
  this is a phenomenon that has occurred over and over again:
  whenever new multimedia capabilities become available to
  Macintosh, such as sound input, control of external video sources,
  and now QuickTime, they are often applied effectively for the
  first time within HyperCard stackware.

  Elsewhere in TidBITS #102, you write, "Because there's no market
  around HyperCard, it's languishing at Claris and everyone is
  sitting around trying to figure out what to do with it." I think
  you should look again. Ask Nikki Yokokura, author of "Exotic
  Japan," if she is just "sitting around." Or ask Steve Riggins,
  chief propeller-head at Voyager, if he's still "trying to figure
  out what to do" with HyperCard. In my view, HyperCard is already
  one of the most useful and most widely used electronic publishing
  tools yet devised, and it has spawned a healthy number of
  impressive commercial products.

  In your comparison of QuickTime and HyperCard, you write,
  "QuickTime is like HyperCard." This is not the case. QuickTime is
  a technology that will be incorporated into applications by
  software developers; HyperCard is a development tool that allows
  people like you and me to become software developers, so that we
  can apply technologies like QuickTime in ways of our own.


Mike Holm adds...
  Kevin, good volley on the TidBITS article. There is a market
  around HyperCard, not only of products like those from Voyager or
  other interactive media publishers, but development tools as well.
  Just ask Ray Heizer or some others. We added a ten page supplement
  of new and updated products to the HyperCard Resource Guide handed
  out at Macworld. The thing to understand is that the overall
  market for development tools on the Mac is small to begin with,
  and HyperCard is perhaps the biggest fish in that small pond. The
  other thing to keep in mind is that HyperCard increased by a
  factor of four or five the number of people creating software on
  Macs over the last four years. This is a non-trivial number (low
  six figures), and one that IBM, Sun, and Microsoft all envy.


Kevin adds...
  I restricted my comments about commercial stackware to just the
  one category of content-based software because that happens to be
  the category that interests me most and because it has recently
  begun to grow at a remarkable rate. I left out such things as
  Danny Goodman's new product, Connections, which had a very good
  review locally in the San Jose Mercury News. Perhaps it would be
  valuable to gather a list of all currently available commercial
  HyperCard-based products from TidBITS readers.

  By the way, I object very strongly to the bias that software
  content is inherently less valuable than software functionality.
  This bias is reflected by the present lack of balance in the
  software market, which is full of whiz-bang file compression
  utilities but still short on engaging software content.

  I like to think of things this way: a laserdisc or a videotape is
  software that contains a movie. An audio CD is software that
  contains music. The Oxford English Dictionary is now contained in
  software, after all these years, as is the full collection of the
  Louvre. When a large software library that contains such things
  becomes cheaply and conveniently available for Macintosh in a
  compelling interactive form, together with additional digital
  amenities, will today's critics of HyperCard tell us that they
  won't be happy until the library also includes a sufficient number
  of best-selling tools for toggling their bundle bits?

  As for me, I think that content is the future of software. I'm
  looking forward to the day when there are software houses as large
  and high-rolling as yesterday's movie studios, with pomp and
  prestige and high production values, that turn out the equivalents
  of "Citizen Kane" and _Tristram_Shandy_ and "The Civil War" for
  software.


And Adam replies...
  You both make some good points here, especially about a field that
  I have been unable to watch due to lack of a CD-ROM drive. I think
  in part what I was getting at is that HyperCard is an incredible
  and flexible tool, but the primary stacks that have succeeded in
  the market are those that provide information, as do most of the
  examples. Of all people, I certainly cannot denigrate software
  content - after all, what is TidBITS but content? - but at the
  same time, we must recognize that both content and functionality
  have their place. I suspect that some of the tension here arises
  from the price differential - Microsoft can charge $495 for Word
  5.0, but Voyager only charges $19.95 for their Expanded Book
  version of Douglas Adams's entire four book Hitchhikers Trilogy, a
  literary feat which took him a heck of a lot longer to put
  together.

  Please also note that I have never implied that HyperCard as a
  product is a failure; merely that the type of commercial market
  that was anticipated by some after the initial release has not
  materialized. My fear is more that without the support of a
  commercial market (which perhaps Voyager and the others are
  providing in this respect) and with the confusing marketing
  policies surrounding it, HyperCard may cease to be a development
  platform of choice for the individual or may even disappear
  entirely, which I feel would be a tragic loss to Macintosh users,
  and even more broadly, to the entire computer community.

  Maybe some of my worry about HyperCard relates to the trouble
  Apple had defining it early on; the term "software erector set"
  comes to mind. I imagined using that erector set to build castles,
  forts, bridges, and Rube Goldberg machines, but all that I see
  surviving on the commercial market are plain houses, albeit
  extremely nicely designed ones with interesting furnishings, if
  I'm not stretching my allusion too far. However, in the course of
  this discussion, I've come to realize that HyperCard's developers
  have always seen HyperCard as a tool for the individual (not as
  competition for MPW C) and as a launchpad for electronic
  publishing, one that I certainly took advantage of with the first
  99 issues of TidBITS. My feelings that HyperCard had failed stem
  in this case from inappropriate expectations, supported as they
  may have been by mediocre marketing, and in fact from mistakes I
  made with that original TidBITS stack considering my means of
  distribution.


HyperCard and QuickTime
  I think my perhaps-too-subtle comparison of QuickTime and
  HyperCard wasn't sufficiently explained. I see them both as
  technologies that Apple created, developed, and marketed, albeit
  in different ways. Obviously HyperCard is a tool while QuickTime
  is an extension to the system, but my point was that if run-time
  read-and-link-only HyperCard had been created and marketed as a
  system extension, then the same sort of market that has sprung up
  around QuickTime would have sprung up around HyperCard, perhaps
  encouraging some of the more varied uses of HyperCard that haven't
  appeared or survived in the commercial market while not
  restricting the information publishers in any way.


HyperCard and Claris
  Finally, my statement, "Because there's no market around
  HyperCard, it's languishing at Claris and everyone is sitting
  around trying to figure out what to do with it," was poorly
  written, which accounts for the answer Kevin gave above. Users and
  developers have absolutely no trouble figuring out what do with
  HyperCard; just look at the gigabytes of stacks available as
  freeware or shareware. I should have said "and everyone there [at
  Claris] is sitting around trying to figure out what to do with
  it." I've heard rumors that the HyperCard team was facing some
  internal difficulties that were slowing development on 3.0, and
  it's obvious from the confusing upgrades and developers' kits and
  hardware bundles that the marketing folks are having trouble
  positioning HyperCard effectively. Something must be done, either
  internally between Apple and Claris, or through the creation of a
  free HyperCard Engine, to ensure that everyone can always use
  these stacks.

  My sincere thanks to Kevin and Mike for participating and for
  providing such fascinating material for TidBITS. I'm sure that
  many of you will have immediate reactions to the opinions here,
  and if you wish to write a coherently-argued article supporting
  your opinions, send it to me and I'll consider it for inclusion in
  our HyperCard retrospective issue (but I can't guarantee I'll
  publish everything).

  Information from:
    Kevin Calhoun -- [e-mail]
    Mike Holm -- [e-mail]
    Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Editor -- [e-mail]


Usenet on a CD-ROM, no longer a fable
-------------------------------------
  by Ian Feldman

  The latest tempest-in-a-teacup of hurricane proportions on Usenet
  is raging quite nicely in the news.misc group. This time the
  subject matter should be of interest to many, so here comes the
  nitty-gritty.

  A company in the USA recently began offering Usenet-on-CD-ROM
  monthly disks for a fee (approximately US$35 per disk, if memory
  serves me right; $25 per issue if one subscribes to it). As a
  product goes it is not expensive; in fact it is downright cheap
  all things considered. Getting a full news feed each day from
  somewhere - even if from a nearby friendly service - is bound to
  cost many times that in telephone charges alone. On the other
  hand.... having the full monthly Usenet (ALL OF IT, from all
  countries of the world, not solely from the USA) arrive in your
  mailbox, even 2 to 4 weeks after the posting date, must be
  considered an incredible and amazing opportunity.

  Ah, to be able to peruse all 500+ MB of it at will, at one's
  convenience, even without formal access to Usenet. Therefore all
  kudos to the initiator, Sterling Software, and may they live long
  and prosper. Thanks for that alternative news feed, even if it is
  a bit slooow. But then, as someone recently said on the net,
  "there are few other media that can beat the bandwidth of a truck
  full of CD-ROMs." ;-)

  Of course, that... feeling of elation, for want of a better
  phrase, was not what the storm was about. Rather than accept the
  service that Sterling Software offers for what it effectively is,
  a different form of the distribution of the net news, the rage was
  all about (1) them charging you for the CD-ROMs (the horror! the
  horror!) and (2) them infringing upon real or imagined
  intellectual property rights of the posters to Usenet.

  Sterling Software, in the words of its spokesman, Kent Landfield,
  makes no claims as to the reuse of the public news that they
  supply. They view themselves entirely as an alternative transport
  and archival service (all those trucks full of CD-ROMs gathering
  dust ;-)) Thus anybody will be free to put the contents of the
  NetNews/CD's up for use with FTP, mount them for access in local
  BBS, import them into the WAIS (Wide Area Information Service) and
  so on. The original posters' rights and restrictions on reuse, if
  any, are still in force. The information on CD-ROMs continues to
  be as free as it was in the beginning.

  Yet, listening to some of the arguments being passed in the heat
  of the discussion it becomes clear that in the mind of the flamers
  it apparently is acceptable that UUNET, PSI, and other
  _commercial_ Usenet providers  charge for the telephone-accessed
  feeds, not to mention the charges to the telephone services
  themselves, but it is definitely not acceptable to offer an
  alternative that's cut in the plastic and aluminum that the CD-
  ROMs are made of.

  No, sireee, the latter is "publishing," therefore constitutes
  criminal unauthorized infringing upon use of _their_ words which
  may not be embossed in stone unless they get paid for it. Well,
  that's roughly how the argumentative posters feel. At times it was
  outright funny, but chiefly left me with a feeling of very limited
  and narrow minds now trying to butter up the importance of their
  own egos, the written end products of which are usually submitted
  in a Without-A-Thought[tm] fashion to the net. Please observe that
  I claim full intellectual property rights for the above
  expression, "Without-A-Thought[tm]," which may not be used by
  anyone without written permission from the undersigned. I waive
  that right for use by TidBITS and Sterling Software however (yes,
  since TidBITS is distributed in the comp.sys.mac.digest group it
  too will end up on the CD-ROMs).

  The above was, of course, a bit sarcastic. But it illustrates well
  where we'd soon be if the extreme arguments against the NetNews/CD
  product were taken at a face value and adhered to universally.
  Anybody[tm] could claim Sole Rights[tm] to Any Expression
  Whatsoever[tm]. Fortunately the company in question has had the
  guts to face up to the potential lawsuit-trigger-happy netters by,
  effectively, taking the legal grounds for a suit out of their
  hands. In a recent message on the net they offer every individual
  among those bent upon not allowing own contributions to be
  distributed in plastic and aluminum to register with them on an
  individual basis, asking them to remove any future posts of his or
  her from the data mass prior to each monthly pressing of it.
  Fortunately the CD-ROMs' contents are prepared by a special
  software that filters such people's posts automatically so the
  process need not be that complicated. One registered letter to the
  Sterling Software and they're gone, gone, gone forever, and the
  rest of us are hardly worse off for it.

  In the end the arrival of such a service may perhaps even lead
  some of the current "I Post Therefore I Exist" submitters (it
  sounds even better in Latin!) to consider twice whether or not to
  risk being an eternal (or at least the life of a CD-ROM) subject
  of ridicule for posting offensive or stupid stuff, an activity
  that up to now has largely been an unpunishable offense. Perhaps
  that in part accounted for the recent outburst on the net, that
  the NetNews/CD effectively changes the rules of the game; from now
  on self-censure becomes a necessity for all posts by all nominally
  responsible, and wishing to retain that label, people.

  The whole issue of the NetNews/CD is too vast and too important to
  be presented here in depth; those interested with access to the
  Usenet may try to read the relevant articles by visiting the
  /usr/spool/news/misc at the earliest opportunity. Alternately,
  send email to the company (addresses below) to be added to an
  administrative (cdnews) or a directional (cddev) mailing list.

    administrative list: [e-mail]
    directional group: [e-mail]

    Sterling Software -- 402/291-8300

  Information from:
    Ian Feldman -- [e-mail]


The PC is not a typewriter
--------------------------
  You may wonder why I'm reviewing a book for PC clones here in
  TidBITS. First, I'm not blind to happenings elsewhere in the
  computer world; I just prefer to focus on the Mac, and second, I
  think everyone who has a friend learning publishing on a PC should
  give them this book to cut down on the egregious errors that show
  up in desktop published documents.

  "The PC is not a typewriter" is a direct descendent from Robin
  Williams's (yes, she of "The Little Mac Book" fame) previous book,
  "The Mac is not a typewriter." The heredity shows - this latest
  anti-typewriter book checks in at under 100 pages and is written
  in the same concise, friendly style. I have to give Robin credit
  for retaining her ever-pleasant style even while discussing
  subjects like curly quotes that drive many otherwise peaceful
  typesetters to violence when desktop publishers blithely abuse
  hash marks. Despite not being much of a desktop publisher, I must
  admit to being something of a snob when it comes to printed matter.
  I like to see curly quotes and all those neat things that the
  computers allow us to do so easily if only we know. The setext
  format strips such goodies out of TidBITS because they cannot pass
  through most electronic mail gateways, but those of you who read
  the HyperCard editions of TidBITS may remember the curly quotes
  and em-dashes. Nonetheless, if you want your work to look good in
  hot toner...

  "The PC is not a typewriter" may contain much of the same
  discussion of basic typographical and publishing terms as the
  previous Mac version of the book, but that's immaterial; the
  advice applies all the more in the PC world. Robin covers topics
  such as single spaces between sentences, curly quotes, proper
  dashes, special characters and accents, underlining, tabs and
  indents, widows and orphans, justified text, the difference
  between serif and sans serif fonts, and numerous other little
  touches that convey an aura of professionalism. Someone we know
  (who should know better) periodically puts together a simple
  family newsletter in WordPerfect 5.0 under DOS, and to put it
  nicely, she needs to read this book badly.

  What sets "The PC is not a typewriter" apart from the standard
  books is that it isn't a "how-to" book, it's a "why" book. Robin
  doesn't attempt to describe in excruciating detail how to perform
  all these beautifying procedures. Instead she clearly explains why
  you want to avoid widows, orphans, and all capital letters, and
  why you want to use curly quotes, accents, and bullets. Those of
  you who have tried to get special characters out of a PC will know
  that it can be about as difficult as it is for Bullwinkle to pull
  that rabbit out of his magic hat. To that end, the book includes
  tables and brief instructions for extracting those characters,
  when possible, from the most popular PC publishing programs.

  Learning to do desktop publishing on a PC can be difficult, but
  using a Mac or a NeXT isn't an option for most people. If you are
  in this situation or know someone in it, do everyone a favor and
  check out this book. If nothing else, it's inexpensive ($9.95
  list), won't take long to read, and definitely won't significantly
  clutter your bookshelf. Highly recommended.

    Peachpit Press -- 800/283-9444 -- 510/548-5991


More on Video Memory
--------------------
  Even with the article we did on the IIsi and IIci video memory
  oddities, the issue remains murky to many people. Glenn Austin was
  kind enough to provide more detailed information which may further
  illuminate the matter, although for those of you who don't speak
  hex, I recommend just ignoring the address information - I did and
  still got the basic idea.

  Here's the memory map under System 6 and 7 on the IIsi and IIci,
  assuming (for the sake of discussion) that there is 8 MB of RAM in
  the machine, 2 banks of 4 MB RAM each, and the machine is 256-
  color capable:

     Where   Description      Size      Logical address
    Bank A    Video RAM      $50000        $FBB00000
    Bank A    Main RAM       $3B0000       $00400000
    Bank B    Main RAM       $400000       $00000000

  So the memory map looks something like this (in 24-bit mode,
  32-bit is similar):

    -----------------
    |     Bank B    |  $00000000 (low)
    |      RAM      |
    |               |
    |               |
    |               |
    -----------------
    |     Bank A    |  $00400000 (high)
    |      RAM      |
    | (above video  |
    |  RAM in phys. |
    |  address)     |
    -----------------
    |      ROM      |  $00800000
    -----------------
    | Video "NuBus" |  $00B00000
    -----------------
    |  NuBus slots  |  $00C00000
    |    $C - $E    |  $00D00000
    |               |  $00E00000
    -----------------
    |      I/O      |  $00F00000
    -----------------

  Whatever shares bank A with the video memory will run slowly
  because the video memory is accessed constantly. Therefore, you
  want to load items that the Macintosh uses relatively
  infrequently, such as the disk cache, into bank A. This was not as
  apparent with System 6, because applications load into low memory
  (bank B) under MultiFinder 6. (This was the main reason that
  MultiFinder was recommended for the IIsi and IIci under System 6.)
  Under System 7, applications load at the _top_ of MultiFinder's
  heap, (that is, in high memory or bank A). The System 7 Finder
  will load into that high memory in bank A - unless that memory is
  already occupied by something else, so if possible, you shouldn't
  load the Finder (a frequently accessed item) in that part of RAM
  that has the most contention between two processes - CPU and
  video.

  Apparently the disk cache uses high memory; MacsBug uses high
  memory; and some INITs use high memory. This helps explain why the
  machine runs slower under System 7 (because the Finder loads into
  bank A, which is also being used heavily by the video), and why
  increasing the disk cache size (or using MacsBug) can dramatically
  speed up the entire Mac. It also explains why System 7 can be
  proportionally slower on the IIsi and IIci than on other Macs and
  why a NuBus video card can dramatically improve performance. Of
  course, an accelerator doesn't hurt either - an accelerated IIci
  (with the Magellan 040 board that Glenn works on) can show up to
  twice the video performance of a Quadra 700, which has built-in
  VRAM.

  Obviously, it's a lot easier to fill up bank A with the disk cache
  and MacsBug if you only have 1 MB in bank A, which isn't a problem
  on the IIsi with its soldered-on 1 MB bank A. The IIci is more
  problematic, since you can easily put 4 MB or even 16 MB in bank
  A, thus making it virtually impossible to fill up bank A in order
  to increase the speed. Of course, if you can afford 16 MB in bank
  A, you can afford a cheap video card that will make this entire
  problem moot.

  Information from:
    Glenn Austin -- gla-aux![e-mail]


Reviews/10-Feb-92
-----------------

* MacWEEK
    DeltaGraph Pro -- pg. 39
    PageMaker 4.2 -- pg. 39
    MacInTax 92 -- pg. 42
    AudioTrax -- pg. 43

References:
    MacWEEK -- 03-Feb-92, Vol. 6, #5


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