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Hard Disk Storage 1985
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bd139:
Ugh classic macs were vile creations. I refused to poke them until Unix appeared underneath.

Just a point that windows fragmentation is still awful now on NTFS by design. Try burning lots of small files. Due to small files being stored in the MFT it causes masses of IO contention that can bring even a nice enterprise SSD to its knees.

You can watch this in action with WSL on windows 10. On the same hardware it takes nearly 40x the time to do an initial grep of the Linux kernel source compared the the same thing on native ext4/Linux install. When it is cached on both platforms it’s a lot faster but windows is then 40x slower due to the cost of NT system calls instead.
james_s:
I never liked Macs back in the day but then ended up with a number of different 68k Macs in my collection alongside some similar age PC hardware. I have to say, the Macs were so far ahead of the PC stuff of that era it's not even funny, there's just no contest. 640x480 or higher with 8 bit color, multi-monitor capable, plug & play that worked, clean polished UI, mice/keyboards that could be daisy chained, onboard SCSI, 3.5" floppies with electric eject that detect disc insertion, built in 8 bit audio in the early ones, 16 bit stereo later. With exception of the low cost consumer models the hardware design is slick, resembling that of high end workstations. A Mac II from 1987 makes a 286 DOS PC look like an antique relic. You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

The downside is they were very expensive, and they sort of stagnated while PCs steadily improved and eventually surpassed them in most ways.
BravoV:
Favorite keystrokes ... >g c800:5  >:D

And most optimal MFM interleave = 4 for "turbo" enabled CPU.  :-DD
GeorgeOfTheJungle:

--- Quote from: james_s on July 10, 2018, 10:58:37 pm ---You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

--- End quote ---
My own Apple II+ had four green phosphor CRT screens, back in 1980 when there was no IBM PCs nor Macs yet. One was the built in video, the other three were Videx Videoterms. In theory I could have had 8 screens in total: built in video + 7 Videoterms.
CJay:

--- Quote from: james_s on July 10, 2018, 10:58:37 pm ---I never liked Macs back in the day but then ended up with a number of different 68k Macs in my collection alongside some similar age PC hardware. I have to say, the Macs were so far ahead of the PC stuff of that era it's not even funny, there's just no contest. 640x480 or higher with 8 bit color, multi-monitor capable, plug & play that worked, clean polished UI, mice/keyboards that could be daisy chained, onboard SCSI, 3.5" floppies with electric eject that detect disc insertion, built in 8 bit audio in the early ones, 16 bit stereo later. With exception of the low cost consumer models the hardware design is slick, resembling that of high end workstations. A Mac II from 1987 makes a 286 DOS PC look like an antique relic. You could pop 6 video cards in the Mac and connect 6 different monitors, everything would auto-detect and configure and it would boot up with each monitor set to the proper resolution, I didn't see proper multi-monitor on PCs until Windows NT and it was tricky to set up.

The downside is they were very expensive, and they sort of stagnated while PCs steadily improved and eventually surpassed them in most ways.

--- End quote ---

I worked on a lot of that era's Mac hardware, had some very nice 680x0 in circuit emulators, about £60K worth eventually, the 68000 pod didn't work well with them because they did multitasking properly in hardware and the pod designers had been lazy/cheap so it failed pretty early in the Mac ROM initialisation process but the rest were a dream to use.

The Macs were wonderfully designed and built hardware but what a crappy company to have dealings with, we got a few stern letters and injunctions to try and get us out of the Mac repair business, Apple *really* don't like competition.
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